4 steps to creating a server maintenance plan that works! | Storm Internet

Server maintenance is a vital but often overlooked part of keeping your customers happy and their data safe. Without consistent maintenance even the most well built networks will fail. In this article I’ll address how important it is to have and adhere to a maintenance service plan and how you can save some money on your server maintenance.

Server maintenance is not a “sexy” topic of discussion. You’re not going to hear a lot about it at office Christmas parties, see books written about it, or hear a TED talk about how it saved a company. But it will keep you from disappointing your customers and losing money and I’ll explain how.

First, let’s examine what I mean when I use the term “Server Maintenance”?

Server maintenance is the ongoing process of making sure that the server is up to date and that the entire business’ computer network is working free of errors. The better your network runs the easier it is for you to keep your customers happy and their data safe.

What happens if you ignore server maintenance altogether?

If you don’t institute and implement a proper IT service plan, your software will be out of date leading to bugs and compatibility problems which can sink the entire organization’s network, websites and leave your customers data vulnerable to intruders leaving you potentially liable.

All because you didn’t have an IT service plan or because a lazy network administrator was too “busy” to implement the plan correctly.

When the network administrator is doing their job, they will be doing preventative maintenance involving reviewing the server’s performance as well as assessing any potential security threats that might arise. Another part of preventative server maintenance is making sure that managed backup and disasters recovery protocols are reviewed on a regular basis as well as making sure that any built in system monitoring utilities are properly installed, configured and working correctly!

Now you might be wondering, all of that sounds great, but how do I actually make sure that I keep my business’s computer network in the best possible condition?

There are 4 steps to maintaining your business’s servers they are:

• Figuring out your server needs.
• Decide whether to outsource or keep in house.
• Create a server maintenance plan.
• Decide your budget.

Let’s break these down a little further…

• Figure our your server needs
  You want to make sure that your server maintenance plan is customized to fit the unique and specific needs of your particular business. Along with creating the plan you need to create a schedule of how often you want to have your network administrator perform the various server maintenance tasks. While it is important to find a schedule that works for you, you don’t want to spend too much time or energy on server maintenance, nor do you want to neglect it and do it too infrequently. One solution that works for many businesses is to check on the server maintenance weekly but only perform the updates or patches when they are present.
• Decide whether to outsource or keep in house
  We’ll talk more about this idea when we get to step # 4 deciding your budget, but you need to make a decision about whether you want to keep your servers, network administrators in office or you want to outsource your server needs to a larger company. Most businesses are better served by outsourcing their server needs unless you require a huge amount of bandwidth for your company site. Only you know what your company needs, but be aware that owning and maintaining your own servers is extremely expensive.
• Create a server maintenance plan
  To ensure that your computer network is running optimally, you or a network administrator need to schedule regular server updates, complete any and all patches and diagnostics, which need to be done and establish a general plan for server maintenance. You can create this plan yourself but it would be much better to either enlist the help of an outside server expert or to allow your network administrator to engage deeper in their job by creating a plan for the company. When you have a successful plan in place and you update the servers regularly, you are well on your way towards making sure that your network stays up and your customers stay happy.
• Decide your budget
  The last thing I want to talk about is the cost of maintaining your servers and computer networks. By this point of the article, I have hopefully impressed upon you how vitally important it is for you to maintain your servers. Without proper server maintenance you will never be able to grow your business online and reach your goals. The problem is that server maintenance can be very expensive, especially if you plan on keeping your own system administrator in your office or working remotely. However you don’t need to bear the full brunt of this expense and companies like Storm, which can help you by providing network support for your business. Through outsourcing your IT support needs, you can have a team of professionals monitoring your servers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week making sure that they keep your business operations at their full capacity no matter where you are or what might be happening in your business at a fraction of the cost of purchasing and maintaining your own equipment.

I know I have shared a lot of information with you in this article, so I want to briefly talk about how you can take everything you’ve learned here today and use it in your business. Because it’s no use knowing how and why you should maintain your server if you don’t actually do it. The first thing you need to do is assess what your servers needs are. Some businesses need fully dedicated servers and managed hosting uk while others can simply rent space in someone else’s server. After you do that, you need to figure out if you want to keep your servers in house or outsource them, chances are if your service needs are low you should outsource. Next you need to create a server maintenance plan and decide who will maintain your servers and what your budget is. Once you’ve gotten all of those steps completed you will have a fully functional server maintenance plan.

In this article I explained what server maintenance is, and why it’s important to the long-term health and profitability of your business. Finally we examined how you can save money by outsourcing your particular server maintenance needs. You no longer have any excuses for not maintaining your servers or spending too much money to do so. The time is now to create and implement a server maintenance plan that will allow you to never have to worry about server maintenance ever again!

If you’d like to know more about putting together an effective server maintenance plan, or would like to outsource the task completely, get in touch by clicking here or call us on 0800 817 4727