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Managed Services - Remote Server Monitoring
In recent years the falling cost of server hardware has been offset by the increasing cost of the support services that are required to maintain its smooth operation. This problem has been further compounded by IT skills shortages and high staff turnover within the IT department.
Against this background the demands being placed on IT staff are increasing, both from the point of view of the complexity of the systems they have to support, and the need to maintain these 24 x 7 x 365.
All this means that when a problem does occur the impact on the organisation can be costly and sometimes disastrous. The most significant cost to business of a server failure is the loss of revenue during a period of inactivity caused by a crash. IT functions and business processes are becoming increasingly integrated, and therefore a problem affecting one server can quickly impact heavily upon the rest of the business.
The challenge is to ensure your servers are kept operational, at all times, with fewer IT staff - an apparently impossible scenario!
A proactive approach to reducing downtime
When many IT departments are struggling to cope with day-to-day tasks, it is easy for them to view server monitoring as an expensive luxury. But the irony is that by taking a more proactive approach to avoiding downtime in the first place they will ultimately ease the pressure on their routine operational tasks.
Many organisations now recognise the importance of server monitoring as a critical component of managing any computer environment. The natural tendency though is for them to attempt to carry out these processes in-house. While this may initially appear attractive, they soon realise that placing these additional tasks on an already over-burdened staff can quickly lead to more problems. Ultimately this leads to the monitoring not taking place at all with the potential for disastrous consequences.
The Gartner Group reports that organisations that perform these services internally incur almost double the costs of those using an external source. This is caused by:
| Cost of initial investment - to set up and monitor the service |
| In-house skills and expertise - the need to maintain all the skills needed to monitor and react to problems |
| Logistics of centralised monitoring - a monitored server can generate a massive flow of events. These need to be centrally correlated into meaningful information that can pinpoint problems allowing proactive and preventive action to be taken. |
Comprehensive server monitoring solution
Lanway offers a comprehensive 24 x 7 x 365 server monitoring solution that covers:
| Proactive, real-time hardware health checks checking for component failure |
| Daily polling of free space of the disk drives on a server |
| Monitoring of anti-virus and security updates |
| Server memory utilisation |
| Verifying the validity of backups |
| Checking the size of SQL and Microsoft Exchange databases |
| Monitoring the Windows events logs |
Issues identified with any one of these factors will automatically trigger an alert to our helpdesk so that immediate action can be taken to resolve the problem.
Benefits
By partnering with Lanway to monitor your servers you will enjoy:
| Less downtime - As critical systems are constantly being monitored and, in many cases, proactively fixed, there will be less downtime across the entire network |
| Peace of mind that major system failures are being minimised - Allowing IT staff to focus on more business related issues |
| Problems resolved faster - we will have always have trained staff immediately available to solve problems as they occur |
| Historical data for planning purposes - Monitoring servers provides invaluable historical data that enables you to make informed decisions when you need to expand or rationalise your IT infrastructure |
| Need for less on-site work and service calls - Out-of-hours problems can lead to expensive service calls and inconvenience for internal staff. Remote monitoring will ensure that such events are kept to an absolute minimum |
| Optimised performance - By having your network and systems monitored at all times, you can also optimise the performance of your IT infrastructure, leading to additional cost savings |
| Security protection always up to date - With new viruses being released almost daily, your anti-virus solution must be constantly updated to ensure its effectiveness. Remote monitoring will give you the peace of mind of knowing that should a problem occur with the updating process you will be immediately notified, allowing you to take appropriate action |
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