Most businesses don’t really think about their IT when everything is working.
Emails arrive, staff can access their files, the internet works and everyone gets on with their day. It’s normally when something stops working that IT suddenly becomes a priority.
We’ve seen this plenty of times.
A server starts running out of disk space, a backup hasn’t completed properly for several days, an employee clicks on a convincing phishing email, or an internet connection goes down at exactly the wrong time.
Some IT problems can’t be predicted. A lot of them, however, give you warning signs.
That’s where proactive IT support makes a difference.
Fixing problems before they become emergencies
There’s obviously still a need for traditional IT support. If somebody can’t open Outlook or a laptop suddenly stops working, they need someone to help.
But that shouldn’t be the only time your IT company is looking at your systems.
Monitoring allows us to keep an eye on things such as servers, network equipment, storage, backups and other important services. If something starts to go wrong, there’s a much better chance of dealing with it before users are affected.
A disk that’s getting dangerously full, for example, is much easier to deal with on a Tuesday afternoon than after a server has stopped working on Monday morning.
It’s not particularly exciting IT work, but it’s the sort of thing that prevents much bigger problems.
Security has changed as well
Cybersecurity used to sound like something mainly relevant to banks, government departments and large companies.
That’s certainly not the case anymore.
Smaller businesses are attractive targets because they still have valuable data, email accounts and money moving through the business, but often don’t have an internal security team watching everything.
Email is a particularly big part of this.
A phishing message doesn’t have to look obviously fake anymore. Some are extremely convincing, particularly when an attacker has done a little research into the company or the people working there.
This is why we encourage businesses to think about security in layers.
A firewall is important, but so are properly configured Microsoft 365 accounts, multi-factor authentication, endpoint protection, email filtering, updates, backups and sensible access controls.
There isn’t one product you can install that suddenly makes a business secure.
Don’t assume the backup worked
This is one we think is particularly important.
Seeing “backup enabled” somewhere isn’t the same as knowing you can recover your data.
We’ve dealt with enough systems over the years to know that backups need to be checked. Jobs fail. Storage fills up. Credentials change. Hardware develops faults.
And sometimes everything appears to be working until somebody actually needs to restore something.
For any important business system, you should know what is being backed up, where that backup is stored and roughly how long it would take to recover.
It’s also worth asking a slightly uncomfortable question:
If our main systems were unavailable tomorrow morning, what would we actually do?
If nobody knows the answer, that’s something worth looking at before an emergency happens.
Microsoft 365 isn’t completely hands-off
Microsoft 365 has made life considerably easier for businesses, but moving email and files into the cloud doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to manage.
We regularly work with Microsoft 365 environments where the important issues aren’t necessarily with Microsoft itself. They’re things such as old user accounts, unnecessary licences, permissions that have accumulated over time, MFA configuration or users having access to information they no longer need.
These are fairly normal things that develop as a business changes.
Someone joins. Someone leaves. People change roles. A temporary permission becomes permanent because nobody remembers it was there.
Regularly reviewing the environment helps keep things under control.
Email deserves more attention than it gets
Email is still one of the systems most businesses simply can’t operate without.
It is also one of the areas where configuration matters.
Spam filtering is part of it, but we also spend time working with SPF, DKIM and DMARC. These help receiving mail systems establish whether an email claiming to come from your domain is actually authorised to do so.
When these are configured properly, they can help protect the company’s domain from being abused and improve the reliability of legitimate outgoing email.
It’s one of those areas of IT that most people will hopefully never need to think about — but somebody should be looking after it.
Sometimes you still need somebody on site
Remote support is excellent and we use it extensively. A large percentage of day-to-day problems can be diagnosed and resolved without waiting for an engineer to travel to site.
But remote support doesn’t replace everything.
Sometimes someone needs to look at the switch, replace a failed drive, trace a network cable, investigate a Wi-Fi problem or simply see what’s happening in person.
That’s one of the advantages of working with a local IT company.
At Business Park Solutions, we’re based in Northern Ireland and support businesses both remotely and on site. More importantly, we try to understand how each customer’s systems actually work.
That makes troubleshooting much easier when something does go wrong.
A quieter day is usually a good result
Good IT support isn’t necessarily about how many problems an IT company fixes.
Ideally, there should be fewer problems to fix in the first place.
Keeping systems updated, monitoring them properly, checking backups and dealing with small warning signs isn’t very dramatic.
But if it prevents an unexpected server failure, catches a backup problem early or stops an employee account being compromised, it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
That’s what we mean by proactive IT support.
If you’re a business in Belfast or elsewhere in Northern Ireland and you’re concerned about the reliability or security of your current IT setup, Business Park Solutions Ltd can take a look at what you currently have and talk through where it could be improved.
No two businesses have exactly the same requirements, so we’d rather start with a conversation than try to sell you a predefined package.
Get in touch with Business Park Solutions to discuss your IT support requirements, or call 028 9590 7195.
