Business is risky, but it is the risks that you aren’t aware of that can be the most threatening. This is usually why businesses call in IT professionals to plan, maintain, stabilise and develop the IT systems that are in place. Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM), can be identified as Planned Maintenance (PM) or Scheduled Maintenance, is in place to schedule maintenance on a specific item, piece of equipment or service. By planning this schedule beforehand, you are effectively eliminating potential breakdowns, downtime and stress – all businesses should be using PPM.
Planned Preventative IT Maintenance is popular in the Manufacturing sector, often where spare parts can be ordered before they are needed, disaster recovery plans and data back-up for those all important data bases. Routine maintenance is normally planned for and performed on a routine basis. IT companies like ICU have taken things one step further and developed a PPM schedule for all types of systems, this would ensure that servers, PC’s and networks are all fault free, secure and regularly backed up.
Organizations can face financial and even perhaps legal liabilities if they lose sensitive data. Data breaches can happen anywhere and anytime but there are a few in particular which SME’s should be made aware of:
- Employee negligence could put your organisation at risk: Tendencies to open attachments to clicking links embedded in spam, leaving computers unattended and not frequently changing their passwords
- Are your Server Message Blockers protecting you enough?
- Employees and their mobiles: An increasing number of employees are now accessing and storing sensitive data on their laptops, smartphones and tablets – what if this information landed in the wrong hands?
By enlisting the help of an IT professional you could remove most, if not all, of these data breaches. IT support are there to <u”>support you, create a plan and help prevent any breakdowns or potential downtimes. It is always better to be aware of external or internal threats before they come to a head, beyond that, there is no going back and it could end up costing your business.
Unplanned maintenance is a pain, and an expensive pain at that. Unplanned IT maintenance is the type of failure that has been overlooked or not foreseen. Unscheduled maintenance is usually due to an unpredicted circumstance, but consequences of this could include:
- Badly manufactured components
- Poor materials
- Badly carried out maintenance procedure
This could lead to:
- High failure rates
- High corrective costs
- Interruption of services
Don’t just think that these consequences just affect the manufacturing industry, they will relate to you, no matter what industry or business.
If you didn’t think that Planned Preventative Maintenance didn’t apply to you then think again. Businesses rely on data bases to stay afloat, what would happen if your sensitive data just vanished one day? Or if your computer was hacked and your computer was infected with malware? For further information regarding Ransomware and Malware head to our last blog post: https://www.icuit.co.uk/basics-ransomware-attacks/.
We all know that business is risky; every day your business will face some sort of threat no matter how big or small. If you could prevent it, would you?
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