When an IT system goes haywire, its technicians must be prepared to step in immediately and assist. Otherwise, companies could face considerable disruption and stress from customers waiting too long for their issue to be addressed.
An effective IT Support team should be accessible 24/7 and boast an impressive first call resolution rate, quickly solving problems to reduce downtime and enhance productivity.
Network Management
An effective IT support system can have a major effect on staff morale and productivity. Just one hour of downtime could cost a business thousands, even millions, in lost revenue – not to mention customers finding it harder to access digital services than elsewhere.
IT services are essential for businesses of all sizes, both to protect data against cyber threats and offer customers a positive customer experience. IT support teams can assist businesses with all aspects of their technical systems including network management. This may involve setting up routers, firewalls and switches as well as managing their configuration – not forgetting deployment and installation of systems software used for network management – plus fault resolution management (identification, tracking and resolution of faults).
Network Security
Network support includes cybersecurity as part of its comprehensive solution, which involves protecting data and devices on an internal network from security breaches that could damage its reputation, cost it money and lead to regulatory noncompliance.
IT support services play an increasingly vital role for businesses of all sizes as cyber attacks become more frequent and potentially damaging to productivity and even downtime, costing companies money in lost productivity and lost time. A good IT support service should detect threats quickly to minimize any repercussions caused by an attack.
Technical network security measures help protect data that is stored on or in transit across a network, such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), intrusion prevention systems (IPS), virtual private networks (VPNs), data leak prevention (DLP) solutions and SIEM solutions. These safeguards ensure unauthorized employees do not gain access to sensitive information or cause disruptions on the network and help detect malware such as viruses, Trojans, spyware worms, phishing attacks and other forms of malicious software on it.
Network Monitoring
Network monitoring is a subset of network management that monitors device and network connection performance. To start this process, hardware, software and network connections along with their respective metrics must first be identified before an organization determines how often to monitor each function; client laptops and printers don’t typically need to be checked as often as routers, switches and servers that form the backbone.
Hardware and software tools found within network monitoring solutions help ITOps teams spend less time performing manual work and more time on projects that create value for the business, such as testing ports, services and applications for availability or identifying network traffic anomalies.
Network monitoring helps detect configuration changes and audit compliance issues, including day-to-day drift in configuration files or compliance exceptions that don’t comply with network design policies. Other functions may include interface/device performance monitoring such as CPU, memory, power supply utilization analysis of network conversations; stream telemetry.
Network Backup
Network backup provides business-critical files with protection from hardware or software failure, data corruption, cyber attacks and other security threats that could make critical files inaccessible to employees and customers alike.
The top network backup solutions offer features to meet business-specific needs such as encryption and monitoring. You can create different backup types ranging from full to incremental and differential and manage the lifecycle of backups by scheduling deletion or recovering data from different partitions.
Implementing network backup is beneficial because it ensures the recovery of lost data, thus mitigating its effect on operations, increasing productivity and alleviating team member concerns about data loss. Furthermore, network backup can protect against security threats as well as meet regulatory compliance requirements; backups may even recover files damaged by ransomware attacks or phishing scams.