Throughout the history of technology, it has always been crucial to ensure that the applications managing structured and unstructured data are consistently available, secure, and performing at their full potential. The same is true for their server, storage, and device hardware, and the related internal and external connectivity infrastructure.
In the cloud era, many businesses find it is in their financial, operational and strategic best interests that they contract out the 24x7x365 monitoring, management and support of their technology. By entrusting managed IT service providers to undertake this monitoring, they free up the time and resources necessary to focus on strategic initiatives and their core business strengths. Enterprise IT monitoring tools like Azure Monitor help to ensure your data is available to those who need and have rights to it.
Here are the main four benefits to look for in managed monitoring service tools for your IT networks and unified communications (UC) platforms.
1. Minimize Online Meeting Interruptions
During the global pandemic, UC platforms like Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, and Pexip kept people connected and in sync with their colleagues, clients, partners and prospects. For most organizations, hosting and managing a UC platform with voice, video, messaging and screen sharing is completely unfamiliar. Extra sets of eyes and hands to support setups, configurations, and run system health checks in the form of UC monitoring tools are especially valuable to organizations with remote employees and contractors.
UC as a Service platforms have alleviated many of the challenges associated with upgrading and maintaining UC deployments. Yet if a significant meeting, presentation or webinar gets interrupted due to device issues or network latency, your business reputation could suffer beyond your control. UC monitoring tools can identify performance issues as they occur with real-time monitoring, and provide expert device and application support and remediation when you need it most.
2. Managed IT Monitoring Tools for Enterprises
It is challenging for businesses to keep their technical resources up to speed with all of the IT monitoring tools and approaches to managing physical, virtual, and cloud computing resources. By contracting with a managed services provider with a proven enterprise monitoring strategy, your team can focus on strategic initiatives, and delegate real-time monitoring to experienced professionals in that technical niche.
These managed monitoring services are at their best when no meeting participants notice outages, breaches, or performance lapses – as these are all being handled by the monitoring provider. That is why enterprise IT monitoring service providers have powerful reporting engines, to identify the threats which were mitigated.
Institutions across industries, especially regulated industries like healthcare and financial services need to ensure their systems are secure, scalable, and available without fail. Further, they need to retain log reports which document the highest levels of performance and oversight. Enterprise IT monitoring services can provide staff augmentation, minimize performance lag, and help your organization meet compliance requirements.
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3. Security, Continuity and Recovery
Does your organization integrate and customize your business applications extensively, or have you hired consultants to do so? Despite best efforts, some development and integration projects can create security vulnerabilities that go undetected for extended periods of time. Managed security monitoring services can identify known, emerging, or Zero-Day threats at the infrastructure, operating system, or application layer.
If your business doesn’t have a 24x7x365 network or security operations center, you could be missing critical network outages or intrusions. Consider entrusting the security of your data to an IT monitoring services provider with expertise in:
- Firewalls
- Intrusion detection and prevention
- Application authentication protocols
- Spam filtering, security incident and event management
- Business and technology continuity and recovery
- Anti-virus and malware prevention
Denial of service attacks, ransomware attacks, and insider-driven data breaches can happen anytime. When breaches, vulnerabilities, and attacks are detected and remediated quickly, your organization can remain secure at all levels while operating at maximum efficiency.
4. Identify Outages and Performance Issues that Go Unreported
Do your employees ever struggle with your corporate video conferencing platform, and when issues arise, switch to a less-secure meeting platform without opening a support ticket? Does your IoT sensor network ever fail, interrupting important data collection for hours or even days? If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, you may be overestimating the security and performance of your devices, applications, and services.
The Modern Workplace includes remote distributed employees, which lacks the walls, visibility, and some of the controls associated with the traditional office of even a few years ago. The most damaging security, performance, and reliability issues are those which go undetected and unreported by employees, partners, and clients. Engaging the services of a continuity services provider that understands the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of distributed workforces can boost productivity.
Don’t lose opportunities, customer loyalty, or employee engagement due to meetings that stop or drop attendees unexpectedly.
Recap and Next Steps
Consider the strategic, financial, and operational value of a managed monitoring service provider with critical partnerships, expertise, and experience in the technology that runs your business.
Having difficulty getting the picture? Put yourself in the shoes of your employee or customer when your applications, online services, or devices fail or lag. Now envision a world where the problems which cause these performance issues are detected before they disappoint anyone.
What value would you place on having all of your digital channels and devices just work, as advertised when you invested in them?
Contact Yorktel, and find out how to keep your IT and UC technologies performing at their peak with our managed monitoring services and a custom enterprise monitoring strategy for your organization.