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Early discovery saves valuable time

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” This popular saying may have some truth to it, but it also overlooks something: the panic and chaos that can occur when something breaks. This is especially true in technology. Everything’s great when your IT is working, but when a server fails or your network goes down, your entire business can come to a sudden halt. Employees get stressed, customers get angry, and everyone is yelling at your IT team while they desperately try to get everything fixed. It’s not pretty. It’s also avoidable with a little preventative maintenance.

Preventative maintenance is fairly simple in concept. Rather than ignoring hardware and software until something fails, you routinely evaluate each item and make small repairs or updates as needed. It’s like when a person goes in for their six-month dental cleaning. Those cleanings give the dentist a chance to look for cavities, gingivitis, and other health issues. By treating them early, they don’t develop into major problems. IT preventative maintenance is the same. By finding problems early, you can avoid major issues later.

Why is Preventative Maintenance Important?

Preventative maintenance is important for a number of reasons:

You don’t lose productivity or sales

When your system is down, your employees aren’t able to work as efficiently (or at all, in some cases). That’s lost time and money. Customers may also be unable to place orders or access their accounts, which can also lead to lost revenue. Aging hardware and software may not be as efficient, which can also hurt your productivity.

With preventative maintenance, you step in before these issues occur. Rather than reacting to issues, you take a proactive approach. For example, instead of using an old hard drive until it fails, you replace it after a specific number of years of use. You determine when this hard drive goes offline, which means you can minimize how disruptive that downtime is to your employees and customers. On the other hand, when a server or other network device suddenly fails, it leads to unscheduled downtime and emergency repairs. Your team and your customers can be without the resources they need for hours, days, or even weeks.

This gives you time to budget for the expense. Buying after an emergency happens also often means paying for expedited shipping, which can be very expensive. This coupled with the loss of productivity and sales due to unexpected downtime can have a significant impact on your bottom line. By being proactive, you avoid losing time and money.

Close up software vulnerabilities

If you’re using software or an operating system that has known vulnerabilities, you’re leaving a door open for cyberattacks. Updating your software as part of your preventative maintenance plan will help close these doors. Software needs to be updated as soon as a patch becomes available in order to ensure your data is as protected as possible.

Your reputation can be damaged, too

You don’t want to be known as that company that is always having computer problems. Preventative maintenance makes everything run more smoothly, reducing the chances of customers getting upset and leaving bad reviews due to technology issues.

You have more control

When an emergency happens, you’re forced to become reactive. You don’t have control over what happened or when it happened. In some cases, you can’t even control what type of repairs you make or when you can make those repairs. With preventative maintenance, however, you do have control over when you take your system down. This means you can schedule downtime to occur when your website doesn’t see a huge amount of traffic or when your employees don’t need to access resources.

Reduces stress

Preventative maintenance reduces emergencies, which in turn reduces the stress you and your team are under. No one wants to deal with an unexpected emergency, especially when it affects others. If software is unavailable or hardware has crashed, it’s going to affect your productivity in some way. If the failure occurs in a client-facing part of your network, you’re likely to get calls from upset customers who are unable to access your services. That puts an additional strain on your team.

Proactive maintenance greatly reduces this stress. While it may not be possible to completely eliminate downtime during business hours, you can notify your employees and customers that services will be unavailable at a specific date and time. You can also schedule maintenance during the slowest part of the day, further minimizing its impact.

How Wooden Spoon Handles Preventative Maintenance

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When you partner with Wooden Spoon, we will do an inventory of the hardware and software you’re using. We may have some suggestions on replacements or updates right away. These suggestions may include replacing aging hardware or updating software to newer versions. In some cases, we may even suggest redesigning parts of your IT infrastructure.

Once that’s done, we will work with you to create a preventative maintenance schedule that both our team and your internal IT team will manage. Your internal team will be charged with handling your local hardware and other tasks that are in your office. We will handle the software updates and the overall preventative maintenance schedule.

Software Updates

We will create a set schedule for updating software. This schedule will ensure that you’re always using the latest version. Often, software such as virus scanners will have the option to enable automatic updating. This option should always be enabled if it’s available so there’s no need for a person to do a manual update. However, we still have a set maintenance schedule even for software that automatically updates to ensure that those updates were done and that the automation is working correctly.

In addition to doing these updates, we also have a tool that will check to see if any preventative maintenance was missed. This will let us proactively deal with the error and get the software updated as soon as possible. Software that isn’t updated with the newest patches can leave the door open for viruses and other types of cyberattacks. It can also affect how well your computers operate or what functions you have available. For example, if there’s an error in an application that causes a computer to freeze up randomly, that issue is affecting your productivity and could result in lost sales. The software needs to be updated as soon as a patch is available.

What About Hardware?

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Typically, hardware preventative maintenance is left to your internal IT team, especially if you’re not located near our office. We can remotely handle maintenance on your software and cloud servers, but we won’t be able to replace hard drives, routers, or other components on-site.

We can help you create a preventative maintenance schedule and provide insight into how often hardware should be replaced. We’re always here to answer any questions you may have about hardware, including when it should be replaced.

Who Needs Preventative Maintenance?

Everyone. There’s no question that preventative maintenance is helpful to businesses in any industry. Even businesses that don’t rely on technology that much can still benefit from preventative maintenance. How many businesses don’t use technology at all? Very, very few. Chances are you at least have a PC and software to keep your records and schedules on. Most businesses have multiple computers, printers, scanners, routers, point-of-sale systems, and more. You need to reduce the risk of any type of sudden emergency in order to reduce stress on your team and your customers.

Wooden Spoon’s team has years of experience in creating comprehensive preventative maintenance plans for businesses of various sizes and in numerous industries. We will work with you and your internal IT team to create a plan that will ensure your technology is maintained and updated regularly to reduce the risk of failure. Reach out today to learn more about what we can do for you.

The Wooden Spoon Process

What can you expect from Wooden Spoon? Here’s a look at our process.

  • 1

    Consultation and Evaluation

When you first reach out to Wooden Spoon, we’ll go through a consultation phase. We want to learn all about you and your business. After we have a good idea about your needs and wants, we’ll talk strategy. You need a good plan before you can do anything. We want to know where you’ve been and where you want to go. We’ll go over your current technology infrastructure carefully to get an idea of what’s working and what you may need to change.

  • 2

    Planning

From there, we can outline the technology you’ll need to support your business, both now and in the future. We’ll design a plan to ensure that you have the resources necessary to be successful. Our goal is to build a solid foundation you can expand upon when needed.

We’ll also build out a security plan. Cyberattacks happen. We’re now at the point where it’s almost a given that someone will try to hack your business at least once. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, how big you are, or how much money you handle—everyone is a target. We’ll put together a plan to protect your data that will cover everything from firewalls to properly configured hardware and updated software. We’ll also regularly re-evaluate this plan and your infrastructure for new vulnerabilities and make recommendations as needed.

Finally, you’ll want to look at continuity plans. These plans cover more than a downed server or loss of internet. You want to consider what you’ll do if data is stolen or if an employee misplaces a laptop full of sensitive information. You need to even look into what you would do if a fire took out your entire physical location or an earthquake destroyed the cloud servers that house your data. We’ll help you plan for just about everything from misplaced flash drives to the AI apocalypse (we plan on welcoming our new robot overlords with open arms!).

  • 3

    Implementation

After we’ve helped you draw up plans for your IT infrastructure, it’s time to implement that plan. This can include a number of different things, such as the following:

  • Optimize the performance of your computers and network
  • Optimize your cloud-based services
  • Enable your staff to securely work remotely
  • Provide additional support to your internal IT team
  • Train end-users to spot cyberattacks, scams, and phishing attempts
  • Address any staff complaints and IT issues
  • Implement support for employees, customers, and other users
  • Provide a ticketing system
  • Install system management tools
  • Manage hardware inventory
  • Document hardware lifecycle and implement a preventative maintenance schedule
  • Formulate necessary IT policies, including security policies

We will keep you up to date with progress every step of the way, and you and your internal IT team will be as involved as you want to be.

  • 4

    Maintenance and Support

Once your new IT infrastructure is in place, we move into support mode. We will put together a lifecycle management and preventative maintenance plan to ensure that your hardware and software are retired before it can start causing issues. We assist you with putting out any fires that crop up, plus we will regularly evaluate your plans and make any changes needed to keep them in line with your overall business strategy. If you have to pivot due to sudden changes in your industry or the economy, we will work with you to revamp your IT plan.

  • 5

    Budget

Many people make the mistake of assuming that outsourcing their IT is going to be more expensive than hiring their own team. It’s typically not. Hiring individuals carries with it a number of indirect costs in addition to paying their salaries. You have to cover insurance, taxes, and other costs, first of all. You also need to have a space for them to work and equipment for them to use. You may even have to deal with higher utility costs.

Wooden Spoon provides you with a set, regular IT cost. You’ll know exactly what you’re paying each month, and that cost will not change unless you need to change the services we’re handling for you.