Here are a few FAQs we have put together to help explain why you need IT Support for your business. Not all these scenarios may be relevant to your business.

1) The cost of downtime!

a. Considering that generally an employee will cost your business £20 per hour.     For every hour that they cannot access the system, costs your business £20 x no. of employees.

b. If your system is down, can you customers still place orders? What value does loss of orders have to your business?

c. General process disruption and playing catch up. If your email goes down, you could face a load of important email coming in and have to find the time to go through and respond to customer queries etc.

d. You will also need the time to catch up on client work, orders etc. This all has a knock on effect to the whole business and ultimately cash flow.

e. This doesn’t even take into account if you actually lose valuable data (a day, a week, a month?) Customer orders? Accounts? Invoices?

2) This can translate to either one member of staff that can’t do their job or the whole office. How useful would it be for an engineer to logon to your user’s computer remotely and fix the problem for them? Saves time, saves money.

3) Why do computers crash?

a. Memory and other components get hot and act erratically

b. Programming errors cause Window’s crashes (i.e. 3rd party software)

c. Problems with actual Windows itself as well as constant security updates can sometimes cause unexpected errors

d. Drivers for printers and add on cards usually are the biggest culprit. Printers and other components are made by thousands of different companies all over the world and can have all sorts of varying results / problems.

e. Hard drives have moving parts which get worn out or damage / lose data if they get jarred or shutdown in the middle of high activity.

f. 3rd party software can lock the computers resources, causing it to go into a loop called thrashing. The computer will then be very slow and un-responsive.

g. A virus infecting the system can also cause file corruption.

h. Finally, an OS can crash if information it needs is corrupted on disk

4) Are your backup’s monitored and tested? Is your critical data backed up remotely / off site? How critical is your data to your business? How many days of lost customer orders, project work, invoices, other accounts data, email and documents can you afford to lose?

5) Viruses cause downtime as well as data and Windows corruption. Is your protection up to date, do you have a strategy to deal with an outbreak? Are you using good virus protection software or something free?

6) Internet access – what is the result to your business if you lose internet access? How long can you be without internet and email for? Do you have a plan in place to deal with this?

7) Peace of mind. Your IT company should be pro-actively monitoring your systems logs and systems and dealing with small issues before they turn into large issues.