Even minor tech problems, if recurring, can erode away the efficiency of busy staff. Costly at best, technical problems are potentially catastrophic if they occur during projects with sensitive timetables.

Often an answer to a question or snag gets things back on track. Sometimes a quick answer can avert a major problem. Having someone to call is a comforting resource.

Two important benefits to covering your important IT assets with a service agreement are cost savings and health; health of your network and you, because you won’t have to worry about it anymore. Cost savings because, (at least from NetService), the time and effort required to fulfill our obligation to you, will always be, on average, much more than you would pay directly for time.

Additionally, a significant discount (proportional to the service agreement size) is applied to any work performed outside the specifications of the service agreement. This benefit is applied to all additional service up to four times the value of the agreement.

The company network is vital to business operations. A professionally managed network is organized, well documented, maintained, and of course, monitored!

The regular attention given to an actively “managed network”, promotes organization and simplicity. Documentation eliminates time lost to cable confusion, and searching for information and passwords.

Formulating a backup strategy, or evaluating whether a backup strategy is adequate, requires that the questions below are answered. The backup plan and execution are of such critical business importance, that answers to these questions for an existing plan, should be no further than a phone call away.

What data do we back up; everything, full systems, file and folder data only?

What devices are we backing up; servers, workstations, network storage devices?

What is the backup target or destination?

• A local server or network storage device
• A USB hard drive
• A backup appliance on the network
• A Cloud backup service

Perhaps the most important question is, “When were the backups last verified?” Test them! Pretend something was lost and see if a backup can be retrieved. Virtualize the server backup to ensure recovery is successful.

There are other important questions as well, such as how much do backups cost us, what is our expected recovery time given a system or data loss, and how far back should we keep archives.