Proactive Server Management

When my car is serviced, the independent garage I use works to a standard guide from the manufacturer who provides a service schedule of tasks for the safe and effective completion of the work.

When it comes to the maintenance and management of a server there is very little in the way of a standard guide,  perhaps because there are often multiple vendors involved, either way there is little guidance to identify what is critical, what’s important and what could be nice to have.

However, in my experience, when asking a group of IT engineers for server management task checklists they usually offer quite similar lists.  When asked to collaborate and use their combined experience of catching problems before they occur, they are at the beginning stage of creating of a robust checklist and documented process with escalation of critical alerts and delegation of routine tasks.

Why proactive?

It doesn’t matter whether you’re interested in servers, cars or something else; many tasks can be broken into simple steps that should take little time to complete and can be easily checked.

 

Mistakes generally occur when urgency takes over, because the checks are missed.

 

When you adopt a planned and proactive approach, it will reduce mistakes which will save unnecessary interruption and repeat work which ultimately saves time.

This is how we have developed our routine for the proactive management of servers and related equipment, and in summary our proactive approach captures hundreds of hours of recent experience.

1. Ensure that routine tasks are undertaken in an efficient sequence and documented
2. Perform an independent check to confirm
3. Report completion of the work package

Whilst there are a lot of basic checklist type tasks, taking a proactive approach also ensures that when we are asked, for example to add a new user we already know that the server is up to date with security patches and we can immediately action the requested task.

Because we look after a lot of servers, much of our routine work is automatically scheduled which allows engineers to focus their time towards tasks that need skilled intervention.

Why choose Sytec to manage your servers?

• We focus on reducing risk
• Our work and checks are seperated independent processes
• We consider compliance and security checks as the default
• You will know which engineer has access and when they took action
• You will have phone, email and face to face access to certified engineers
• We maintain priority escalation to Microsoft’s Premium support

In summary, Sytec will handle the management and security of maintaining servers, we’re good at this.