Reinforcing the Need for Preventative Maintenance and Monitoring for Your Network

In our last post on the basics of preventative maintenance and network monitoring solutions (MMS), we indicated we would share a case study to illustrate how a MMS service could have saved a recent client thousands of dollars and eliminated significant headaches. We’ll refer to this company as ABC Co.

Unexpectedly at the start of a work day, 40 employees at ABC Co. could not login to their network to access email or critical work applications – in other words their staff could not do their job. ABC Co.’s internal IT administrator spent a full day trying to resolve the issues themselves unsuccessfully, after which they contacted Tech To U for assistance.

Our team determined there was no communication occurring between two servers as authentication had not been configured properly by a previous IT services provider. This incorrect configuration was causing the login failure and as a result. ABC Co.’s administrator had no idea about this issue because an MMS was not in place.

Alerts were issued by the server but they could only be viewed after logging into their server. In fact, server warnings about the configuration issue had been repeatedly logged over a six-month timeframe before the login failure occurred. But it had not been viewed and thus was not acted upon.

It took over a day for our team to properly configure the servers. 48 hours had now passed whereby the 40 employees had no access to email or core business applications.

After completing the fix, our technicians logged into the servers to assess activity in log files since the login failures began. The following was discovered:

• • Clients had sent urgent messages to ABC Co.’s employees that were not responded to
  • 200+ emails had not reached the intended recipients
  • Many service orders had been missed

Worth mentioning: ABC Co. has made significant investments in a backup and recovery system in the event of a “failure”. Unfortunately, due to the configuration issue, the investment in the backup servers as part of the failover plan didn’t help.

To summarize, ABC Co. experienced the following financial impacts:

• • 40 employees operating at 25-50% capacity for an entire business day
  • Emergency, on-site visit by IT provider requiring a full day of effort to diagnose and resolve the issue
  • Lost orders

Tech To U estimates the minimum financial impact of this outage was $10,000 (fees for IT services, wages paid to unproductive staff while they couldn’t work). But we feel the opportunity cost of having 40 staff functioning at such reduced productivity would have led to more significant financial costs.

As stated in our previous post, an MMS can be purchased for less than $500/month. An MMS seems like a no-brainer to us. Interestingly enough, this new client is still deliberating whether an MMS service makes sense going forward….

Tech to U offers a full suite of Network Solutions. Read more about how our Preventative Maintenance and Network Monitoring service can help your business or Contact Us for a complimentary consultation.