Computer systems play a crucial role in your company’s daily operations. Problems with those systems can disrupt your operations—and those disruptions can lead to lost productivity, lost customers, and lost business opportunities. Consequently, keeping your computer systems secure and operating at peak efficiency needs to be a top priority.
How to Keep Your Systems Running Smoothly
To help ensure safe, efficient computer systems, you need to monitor and manage all facets of your IT environment regularly. This means you need to:
Apply Software Updates
Applying software updates is a task that sometimes gets postponed or ignored, but it is crucial that you apply updates promptly. Proper patch management helps to fix any bugs discovered in your applications as well as provide enhancements. Most importantly, though, updates close known security vulnerabilities, which helps protect your computer systems from cyberattacks.
Keep Track of IT Assets
Another important but often ignored task is regularly auditing IT assets, recording such information as serial numbers, licensing details, and location. For computing devices, it is also important to keep track of information about the installed applications, including their version numbers. Tracking IT assets lets you know much more than simply how many devices you have and where they are located. You will know other pertinent information such as how old your equipment is, when a license is nearing its expiration date, and whether applications are receiving the necessary patches and updates.
Make Sure That Your Computers Are Secure
Monitoring your devices for known security issues is one of the most important parts of your overall computer security strategy. While monitoring your computers for missing software updates is a good first step, more needs to be done. For instance, you should monitor a computer’s event logs to see if there have been numerous attempts to access it. This provides insight into what attack is taking place rather than finding out days or weeks later when a hacker manages to steal data or implant malware.
Make Sure That Your Computer Systems Are Performing as Expected
The time to think about the performance of your computer systems is not when they grind to a halt. You need to continually monitor the performance of your devices. For example, you should regularly track memory and processor utilisation as well as check the amount of free disk space available. Collecting performance data about your computer systems over time lets you identify detrimental long-term trends.
Monitor and Manage Mobile Devices
Employees are increasingly using laptops, tablets, and smartphones for work both in and out of the office. When you provide employees with mobile devices, you need to monitor and manage them just like desktop computers. If employees are permitted to use their own mobile devices for work, you should provide secure mechanisms (e.g., virtual private networks) for the devices to connect to your computer systems and then manage those mechanisms.
This list is by no means exhaustive. There are many other tasks on a monitoring and management “To Do” list.
Have Peace of Mind without All the Work
With all the tasks that need to be done, monitoring and managing your computer systems can be a tall order. We can take care of these tasks for you, so that you can concentrate on running your business.
Our team will remotely monitor and manage your computer systems, uncovering security and performance issues so that they can be addressed before they turn into larger problems that can cause downtime. You will have peace of mind knowing that we will be watching your computer systems 24/7, keeping them safe and operating at peak efficiency.