What Do We Mean By Structured Cabling Service Providers?
What Do We Mean By Structured Cabling Service Providers?
Proactive is a word used very actively in the tech and digital ecosystem. Still, the emphasis is rarely enough on what is the scope of a proactive approach. Especially when we talk about structured cabling service providers & IT systems.
It doesn’t matter if you’re running a SaaS based platform, a retail store, or a tech based startup. Dealing in digital products, there are various aspects to comprehend to deal with a proactive approach.
In this discussion, we’re going to focus on some of the relevant aspects of proactive IT service management.
Proactive maintenance
Easily, one of the foremost and most important measurable aspects in IT service management. Proactive maintenance is often at the forefront for every IT service provider in the industry.
Although there are some urgent tasks including security alerts and patches for newly caught threats. Here are the important proactive maintenance works that can be employed in most environments.
Patch management
With every release of security patches, a critical security check is required to be performed for PCs, servers. Or simply, any other device which runs on an operating system.
While less critical security patches are often performed on a weekly basis.
Lifecycle and version management
Replacing or more appropriately upgrading old devices that are still acquiring support from vendors. However, lifecycle maintenance and versioning should be done prior to the end-of-life date.
Configuration management
Rights management and technical configurations should be sufficiently gone through to ensure the system is running in mint condition.
Proactive monitoring
Depending on the nature of your industry and the type of technology stack in use, monitoring can vary greatly. In short, monitoring doesn’t come as a one-size-fits-all approach.
Network monitoring
Traffic running through LANs and WANs can fluctuate greatly, even stop entirely at some instances, but is predictable.
As the name suggests, the job of network monitoring is to detect glitches and failures that slow down or break network chains. Understandably, this is extremely important for tech-based companies where servers are present on the premises.
Systems monitoring
Databases, vital servers, and similar production devices can be checked for uptime and health. Yes, installing hardware monitoring is somewhat foolish, but monitoring an email server or related servers running powerful business software is important.
Web application monitoring
Similar to how Google Analytics monitors how many users are actually interacting with your website, obviously, you want to know how much time it takes for a web-facing application to load, how many people are interacting with it, etc.
User monitoring
Agreeably, monitoring users can be done at a variety of locations. For instance, are the users logged, already logged, signed out, and so on.
While other purposes are to see if key accounts are compromised, for instance, detecting unauthorized sign-ins from suspicious IPs and alike.
Proactive backup management
Data is the raw gold for the tech industry today, something that is used to extract values worth billions of dollars for users worldwide.
Hence, proactive backup management isn’t a task to take easy as replacing data could be expensive for your IT team.
Monitoring
Having a backup isn’t enough, it doesn’t matter if it’s a fully functional, loaded server or even a simple online digital marketing resource. You need to keep close checks on your backups.
Evidently, backups can fail for a plethora of reasons ranging from hardware damage to data limitations and bandwidth issues.
General management
Are you backing the right data is the 2nd important consideration. For example, you might be backing excessive data causing other technical issues to arise.
In doing so, you can incorporate several checkpoints to see what data solutions are actually doing in order to ensure you’re extracting and making use of the right data.
Strategic planning
Yes, it might seem a pointer out of a marketing and top-level management book, but not everything in technology is about tedious system checks and engineering debacles.
Budgeting
As we see, most of the items enlisted in this article require a definite investment especially in areas like systems engineering and lifecycle management.
Unfortunately, you don’t want to see Windows 8 nearing its end and your company doesn’t have sufficient budget to keep the systems supportable and safe.
Business productivity and satisfaction
A system performing in top-notch condition is a good thing from a technical standpoint, but don’t forget that at the end of the day even each click is accountable to achieve a particular business purpose.
Gauge the touchpoints in terms of operational efficiency and business productivity that where things are doing well, and what gaps can be filled.
It doesn’t matter if you’re one of the best-structured cabling service providers or a full-stack tech agency. Much of the effort will be put to future use by software engineers and IT project managers.
