The Journey to a Proactive IT Department

The Challenges

As in most companies, IT is a cost center and as IT professionals we face certain challenges. These challenges include unpredictable/costly downtime, managing IT costs, time management, prioritization, risk and exposure as well as strategic issues. Each of these challenges revolves around time and money.

Often, these challenges are aggravated by time constraints, lack of prevention, low department knowledge levels and unpredictable costs. All of these factors can lead to many IT setbacks and most of all potential data loss. According to a peer review journal from the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University, data loss is caused by the following reasons:

In order to mitigate these challenges, IT management must become more proactive. We hear this term in many different contexts. We hear “work smarter not harder” or “don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today”, and in many cases IT professionals would love to have the time and resources to live by these philosophies. However, as technology becomes more and more critical for businesses to survive, IT is forced to respond quickly to the demands of all other departments that, by the end of the day, constitute the organization’s profit centers. In order to be able to respond to these demands, IT must have a proactive approach.

The Approach

There are many ways a company can achieve a more proactive IT culture. For example, by hiring additional IT staff, acquiring backup hardware and regularly checking up on system performance. However, each of these solutions requires additional time and resources to manage. Now, with the popularity of cloud based services and software as a service (SaaS) there is a new option. This option is called remote monitoring and management (RMM). FMT Consultants is now offering this type of service. We call it FMT Managed IT Services.

FMT Managed IT Services uses the following approach to guarantee a successful proactive approach:

• Assess
• On-board
• Manage
• Optimize
• Protect

The first step is to assess our client’s environment and report on issues and action items. Second, we perform the on-boarding which is to schedule initial maintenance activities, projects, and remediation of items to stabilize the environment. Next, ongoing management including system monitoring and maintenance ensures to keep IT systems up to date and running smoothly. By leveraging the power of enterprise class automation technologies, we make sure to keep all IT infrastructure systems optimized at all times. Finally, FMT Managed IT Services protects IT systems using industry best practices in security and backup management

The Benefits

With the implementation of proactive IT services from FMT our clients have shown measurable results in the following areas:

• Significantly improved overall system reliability and performance
• IT spending focused on issue avoidance and service optimization rather than “fighting fires”
• Predictable network and system management costs
• Improved security
• IT that supports and focuses on business initiatives

FMT utilizes enterprise level reporting on hardware, operating systems, applications, and network systems to aid IT departments with the IT roadmap and linking IT to each business unit’s needs. Additionally, FMT uses issue tracking and resolution technology to properly manage the client’s environment.

Next Steps

If increasing system uptime, staff productivity, cost predictability, alignment of IT to business needs, and transparency into IT performance are on your priority list, then contact FMT Managed IT Services to schedule a discounted IT assessment and initiate your journey to a proactive IT department.

Written by:
Jim Graham, IT Solutions Manager
FMT Consultants