Scenario 1 (traditional IT): You arrive early to your office on Monday morning at 7:30 hoping to finalize the proposal you started on Friday before the remaining staff arrives. You try to log into your computer only to find that the network is down and the server won’t restart. You later find that it went down sometime over the weekend when the second drive in your RAID array died and couldn’t rebuild.
It’s 9:30 before your IT company returns your support call as they had a number of customers calling due to weekend interruptions and another hour before their tech arrives and diagnoses the problem. You then find out that it will probably take another 8-12 hours to get a replacement server in place and restore the backups.
Scenario 2 (managed services): Two weeks prior to the above date the monitoring software on your server had notified your managed services provider that one of the drives on the server was about to die and another drive in the array was reporting higher than normal read errors. The tech on duty was able to remotely run a diagnostic on the drives and called you to report the errors and ask for authorization to replace the drives which they did – one at a time allowing the array to rebuild itself overnight between each drive replacement. The network never went down and your staff never knew there was a problem.
The value of this level of proactive management? In the middle of the crisis it is virtually priceless but in actuality – even with the nominal monthly service fee it ends up being far less expensive.
Paying a tech emergency service rates for 8-12 hours while putting in a temporary server and restoring the backup would easily run into 4 figures and then you still have to fix your original server when the new drives arrive. Add to this the cost of 10-15 employees without access to your customer data for the day and the first scenario has easily cost you several thousand dollars in lost wages and unhappy customers.
Check out the additional benefits of managed services…
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