With the constant changes to technology and the daily development of new threats, it takes a highly-trained technician to maintain even a simple 3 to 5 person network; however, the cost of hiring a full-time, experienced technician is just not feasible for most small business owners.
In an attempt to save money, most try to do their own in-house IT support and designate the person with the most technical expertise as the part-time IT manager. This never works out because this makeshift IT person has another full-time job to do and is usually not skilled enough to properly support an entire computer network anyway.
This inevitably results in a network that is ill-maintained and unstable. It also means that the backups, virus updates, and security patches are not getting timely updates, giving a false sense of security.
It’s only a matter of time before the network crashes. If you’re lucky, it will only cost you a little downtime; but there’s always a chance you could end up like one of these companies:
Auto Body Shop Shells Out $20,000 To Clean Up A Virus
A local auto body shop with multiple locations discovered the importance of preventative maintenance the hard way. Without warning, a virus was downloaded to their server and started replicating and attaching itself to files. This virus corrupted their data, impaired their customer management system, and immediately brought down their Exchange server (no e-mail could come in or go out).
Preventing this disaster would have only cost them 1/25th of the cost ($800 per month) AND they would have experienced better performance and fewer problems with their network. Instead, they were forced to spend a whopping $20,000 to remove the virus and restore their network. Even then, this huge enormous fee only got them back up and running; their systems were still not optimized, secured, and updated, as they should have been.
Two Failed Hard Drives Cost Health Products Company $40,000 and 9 Days of Downtime
The back office of a health products company had two hard drives fail at the same time, causing them to lose a large number of critical customer files.
When they contacted us to recover the data from the system backups, we found the backups weren’t functioning properly. Even though they appeared to be backing up all of this company’s data, they were in fact worthless. In the end, recovering the data off of these failed drives took a team of disaster recovery specialists 9 days and $15,000. In addition to the recovery costs, they also incurred $25,000 in other services to get their network stabilized.
Had they been properly monitoring their network, they would have been able to see that these hard drives were failing and that the backups were not performing properly. This would have prevented the crash, the downtime, and the $40,000 in costs to get them back up and running, not to mention the 9 days of lost productivity while their network was down.
Property Management Company Spends $9,000 And Weeks Of Downtime For A Simple Inexpensive Repair
A 10-user property management company was not monitoring or maintaining their server. Due to the overuse and lack of maintenance, it started to degenerate and eventually shut down under the load. This caused their entire network to be down for two full days and cost them $3,000 in support fees to get them back up and running. Naturally the costs were much higher when you factored in the lost productivity of their ten employees during that time.
This client did not want to implement a preventative maintenance program so the same problem happened again two months later, costing them another $3,000 and two days of downtime.
Six months later it happened yet another time bringing their total to $9,000 in hard costs plus tens of thousands in productivity costs for a problem that could have quickly been detected and prevented from happening.
Quvecta specializes in preventing the threat before you even know it's there. Our experience over a vast range of businesses help us anticipate problems and know what to be on the lookout for. Putting in the proper security measures upfront means saving both money and a lot of frustration in the long term. Are you ready to ensure your companies security?
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