So I find myself every once in a while saying, I can do that!  I mean how hard is it to really put in a new light switch?  You have 3 wires that connect to power, neutral and ground?  What a piece of cake!  I deal with wires every day.  While I would have no issues in doing this in my house I could never do it for a friend!  So I had to ask myself, why is that?  Well for me it is the responsibility that comes with replacing that switch.  What would happen if there was an electrical fire or I nicked a wire I did not see and someone got hurt, or even worse died.  I am not a certified electrician.  So why would I even try it myself?  Well to save money of course!  It is a risk that all of us take when we say, I CAN DO THAT.

I bring this up of course because so many Charleston business owners think that they can manage their computers and networks themselves.  How hard can it be, right?  Just run a few updates and make sure the Anti-Virus software is updated and you’re good to go.  Right?  Or some of you even have the, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” mentality.  Well let me tell you from 14 years of IT experience, in Charleston, neither of those work.
Every year around the New Year, we try and do a free checkup for the clients that we do not manage from day to day.  Something we adopted a while ago.  We do a free checkup for our clients.  We login to the servers, switches and routers and make sure everything still looks good under the hood.   If something is not right, we document it and report back to our clients telling them what we found.  Sometimes it is just some Anti-Virus issue or a quick firmware update but other times we find an IT horror show.  So this month I wanted to give you a quick list of the horrors we found this year.  Now understand these are clients that we only look at their computers and networks when they call us.  Things can go very wrong very fast if you’re not careful.  The following issues are from only 3 of our clients:

    1) Tape Backups that have not completed for over 6 months.  The tapes were bad and could not perform the daily backups.
    2) Original Firmware on another Dell Server from 2006. Newest release was from October 2009.
    3) Two out of five hard drives had failed in a single server office.  If the server went down they would be out of business.  This was the same office as item #1.
    4) Anti-Virus Definitions that had been out of date for more than 6 months.
    5) 58 Microsoft Critical High Risk Updates on a single server office.

There is a reason that large companies have a full-time IT staff.  It is to keep up with the house keeping of a network.  What would have happened if one of these issues caused your business to shut down for 3-4 days?  That is how long it will take for you business to start operating again, and much longer to fully recover.  I find that too many companies do not understand the threats that hit their company EVERY DAY! The threats that are out there now affect every company from the Mom and Pop to the Fortune 100.  If someone is not monitoring and maintaining the network and checking it out, then who is going to?   With the technology we have at our fingertips we can do all of these things for you.  If you are wondering the same thing about your computers or networks for your business then give us a call!