Proactive Support: The Unsung Hero

When supporting a Windows network, there are really two main components that have to be addressed: proactive and reactive Information Technology support.

Many companies in our service area - San Francisco Bay Area and East Bay Area - may not realize the importance of proactive support. It provides the base level that allows reactive support to be productive. For a network to be reliable, both elements need to be in place and focusing on the reactive will only delay problems, not stop them.

Granted, some companies don’t have the resources allocated to provide both elements and simply react when things inevitably go wrong. Many IT consulting companies focus on reactive support which is cost-ineffective because the IT companies bill so many hours trying to fix problems that weren’t handled proactively.

Proactive Bay Area IT Support Will Save You Money

For example, a hard-drive fails on RAID 5 (with redundancy) but because there are still two more drives that are working, the problem goes unnoticed. So when then next hard-drive fails and the network goes down, the IT consulting company then gets to bill tons and tons of hours to ‘fix’ the network because they didn’t proactively support their network. This situation works out great for the IT provider because they make a lot of money, but really poorly for the client because they have to spend more than they budgeted for and their network is down.

That is the exact reason why my employer, Endsight, in Berkeley, CA, developed a division that is solely dedicated to providing proactive support on month-to-month rather than an hourly basis. In this way engineers aren’t bogged down with handling reactive issues and can take the time and care to adequately analyze our clients systems to prevent as many common problems from materializing. They also don’t have to worry about how many hours our clients have “approved” and thus they can actually do thorough and complete work.

While our Bay Area IT System Administrators are handling our clients’ in the proactive support, we also have a Bay Area Response Center that is situated to respond to any immediate calls. In this way Endsight has been able to clearly define the difference between proactive and reactive support and delegate tasks to either group to provide an extremely cost-efficient model that allows our clients to have enterprise level IT support and a lower total cost than those focused on reactive only.

Being Invisible is Good for Bay Area IT Management Clients

Unfortunately, the very nature of the proactive support is preventative and thus it tends to go unnoticed. This means that the better job someone does, the less likely anyone recognizes and appreciates those efforts. Companies don’t spend any part of their day thinking about their network unless they have to, so naturally if everything is going well, they won’t think about the proactive support that is being done which leads to complacency.

It takes continual involvement on our part to educate our clients in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area on the implementation and upkeep that is occurring and the active care that is being provided. Proactive support is not only great for our clients but also good for us as the outsourced IT provider because the more issues we can handle proactively, there are fewer issues we have to handle reactively.

No more XP?

Yes, it’s true….XP is out and Vista is in. There has been so much negative publicity regarding Vista, and for good reason. In my humble opinion, the release of Vista was poorly managed and perhaps the worst job Microsoft has done in releasing a desktop OS in two decades. The single biggest problem is that Microsoft seemed to overlook how important that third party software vendors were prepared. Print drivers, VPN clients, and a mass of other software simply did not work when Vista was first released. While customers who moved to the new version of office may experience minor inconveniences such as not relearning how to do basic tasks such as ‘undo’ or ‘save as’ like when moving to a new version of office; moving to Vista broke major functionality such as printing and accessing network files remotely.

So then, where are we know? I think moving to Vista is inevitable for most businesses and home users…and I think the time is about right. Most of the major problems have been addressed. While there is always going to be the minor hassle of dealing with a new user interface, people are simply going to have to be dealt with that. Vista is here to stay and does have some fantastic new features that frequently get overlooked such as:

• Sophisticated graphics
• Better search and organization tools
• Improved security
• Easier access to information and applications
• New multimedia functions and tools
• Improved system tools for backups, updates, and more

Given the problems and resistance most people have had, we’ve all lost site of the Millions of dollars in R&D that have gone in to this protect to move technology forward.

My advice? The time has come. Suck it up and move forward.