No time like the present
“I want it and I want it now!” The saying may sound uncompromising and demanding but it encapsulates much of our fast-paced world of today and the future. The need for immediate satisfaction and gratification is compounded by Wi-Fi technologies which ensure that we are connected 24/7, wherever we are and whatever we’re doing. In an online-driven existence, nobody waits anymore. A client shopping on the web for service will soon move to a competitor if your website fails to load or if loading is deemed too slow. Worse still, if your site is down, potential clients are gone forever.
As the owner or executive of a small to medium-sized business (SMB), you need to prioritise constant accessibility and optimal uptime of your IT systems. Remember that if your technology fails, so does your SMB.
How resilient is your IT infrastructure?
Thinking about your business from an IT perspective, silently – and truthfully – answer these questions to determine how confident you are about your servers, database and operating systems:
- Do your website and mobile applications function efficiently, effectively and around the clock?
- Are you doing everything you can to meet the demands and expectations of your clients and prospects?
- Do you have tested disaster recovery plans in place to ensure that the impact of downtime is minimal and short-lasting?
- Will your systems operate trouble-free at the times when your IT engineers are unavailable to provide support and maintenance?
No doubt you quickly provided a positive response to all the questions. If not, you may need to consider the inclusion of cloud monitoring as part of your IT infrastructure support mechanism. Not only is a cloud monitoring a relatively inexpensive solution, but the service will enhance many aspects of your business including your reputation, productivity, and you’ll be pleased to hear profitability.
Ignorance and fear of the cloud
A study conducted by Wakefield Research, a Washington D.C. based marketing research firm, revealed that more than 50% of businesspeople surveyed stated that they had never used cloud technology. Of course, they were wrong. They use the cloud unknowingly, whether sending an email, shopping online or conducting a bank transaction via a mobile application.
Many SMB owners, particularly those with little tech-savvy, are apprehensive about migrating their server with all its data, and their web monitoring services to the cloud. They fear that they will lose control of their IT infrastructure and that their precious company data will not be safe and secure. However, a famous U.S. statesperson once said: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Those words of wisdom certainly apply when considering moving to the cloud. You can take comfort in knowing that the cloud means moving the storage and access of your data, files and applications from local hard drives to the web. No worries and no fear.
How you benefit from cloud monitoring
As with any piece of hardware, servers, their shared resources and the applications they operate from, must be monitored. This is cloud monitoring, achieved via multiple remote locations using virtualisation technology.
Cloud monitoring makes it easier to detect patterns and potential problems within your IT infrastructure. Such issues may be too time-consuming or complex for your in-house engineers to identify. Cloud monitoring ensures that your website is delivering accurate and readable page content and that page download speeds are optimised. You further benefit from cloud monitoring since it can detect website changes and flag any instances of data compromise.
As mentioned, to remain competitive, your SMB needs to be online 24/7 with little or no downtime to disrupt business operations. By continuously analysing and testing your network, website and applications, cloud monitoring reduces downtime by 80%. Cloud monitoring also regularly checks the performance of your email server, thereby minimising delivery failures and other email problems.
Move into cloud monitoring
As we said in the introduction, ‘there’s no time like the present.’ In this case, time to move into cloud monitoring. Besides ensuring that your website delivers as it should, reducing downtime and optimising email systems, cloud monitoring provides alerts so you and identify and fix issues before they end in disaster. Moreover, cloud monitoring is a great opportunity to gain insight into how end-users experience your website. By moving into cloud monitoring, you’ll be enhancing the overall experiences of your end-users, clients and employees alike.
