We’ve all been there before; watching our computers crashing and constantly rebooting, sitting around doing nothing because our office network is done or even scrambling to send apology emails to thousands of clients because there was a data breach in your systems that may have revealed some personal data.
The importance of keeping IT failures at a minimum is well-understood, but it’s also incredibly difficult. In this article, we’re going to talk about a couple of simple solutions that will help you prevent IT failures from happening in the first place, how to build a redundancy plan and also how to boost productivity even when the unexpected happens.
Upgrading From Performance Issues
Computers are known to slowly get worse over time, but is this a reality or just misunderstood? Hardware doesn’t really degrade that quickly. In fact, even hard drives (a common failure point of most computers) can last years without suffering any major defects. Although they can cause computer performance issues, you’d be surprised at just how much of your performance is actually being affected by factors such as how you use the computer.
For instance, installing too many programs, having too many browser tabs open or even buying an underpowered computer, to begin with, can be a bigger problem than you’d expect. As a result, you’ll need to upgrade your computers if you want to prevent performance issues from happening, and you also need to consider reformatting computers in order to clear out unneeded software and files.
Have Support Ready
One of the best ways to deal with IT issues as soon as they come up is to partner with an IT support solution. This is often a local or national business that can be contacted if you ever need help installing new hardware or fixing existing machines. They can also suggest changes to make to your office computing solutions for better efficiency.
Support is necessary especially if you’re a relatively small business that has yet to hire their own IT department.
Redundancy Planning
There are plenty of ways to ensure that you have a backup plan for when a network goes down or when a computer breaks. The first thing to do is ensure that you have some basic spares. This includes spare monitors, keyboards, mice and so on. They’re inexpensive, they’ll keep you productive and they’re easy to store.
However, you should also consider redundancy planning for your IT infrastructure as well. For example, a backup power solution to keep your computers powered in the event there’s a blackout will mean you can save all your work and back up your data before you lose it to a power cut. You should also think about having extra storage backups in the cloud or off-site to ensure that even if something happens to your building, you have a recent data backup to restore to.
There are many challenges that businesses face on a daily basis, but IT problems don’t need to be as fearsome as many make them out to be.
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