A question we are regularly asked is: do SMEs need IT monitoring? To which we always reply – absolutely. Why? Because IT is a mission-critical asset – no exceptions. The other reason is IT professionals in SME organisations are more stretched than counterparts in larger organisations, with fewer staff, more demands, and with responsibility for every aspect of IT delivery, SMEs require an effective monitoring solution as much as, if not more than, their big counterparts. Let’s face it, if you are an IT professional working for an SME you know you have limited resources, you can’t afford to have sophisticated management systems in place, and neither do you have specialist administrators because the chances are you’re responsible for everything – right?

But IT monitoring is so expensive I hear you say? It used to be, very expensive. However things have changed significantly and there are more options available today than ever before, including Infrastructure Monitoring as a Service (IMaaS) – please do download our whitepaper on this topic so you can really understand how this IT monitoring delivery model can help you.

IMaaS constantly monitors your IT assets by utilising intelligent and lightweight agents (or probes) to periodically collect and monitor status and performance information from diverse and complex IT environments – including network devices, servers, databases, applications, and more. The information is validated against pre-defined thresholds or policies to generate notifications about potential breakdowns, which are sent to IT personal, via email, SMS, audio alarms or popup windows.

Let’s look at a few of the benefits…

• Value – the most important part of the IMaaS story is cost and value. By investing in IT monitoring as a Service, the overall IT costs are significantly reduced, which means you can spend limited IT budgets on more strategic assets. It also frees up skilled IT staff to focus on more value-add functions, as the vital yet mundane task of infrastructure monitoring is taken care of in the background. As an IT professional, would you prefer to be focused on solving real business problems? IMaaS frees you up to do just that, and that means more professional satisfaction for you and your IT team
• Customer Trust – when your IT system falls down and causes outages, it creates a lot of customer dissatisfaction. If your system is monitored, issues are identified before they become a problem, and that means a better experience for customers and end-users of IT
• Pro-active – with IMaaS in place, IT teams can be pro-active rather than re-active. Without effective monitoring, even a relatively simple IT environment can become challenging, with a cascade-effect leading to bigger issues – like outages – which costs companies a fortune, not to forget the frustration it causes. IMaaS highlights and captures all of these potential issues long before they become bigger problems, so you can act on them immediately
• Flexibility – IT environments are complex, with most companies deploying best-of-breed, multi-platform solutions. If you are currently deploying vendor-specific monitoring solutions for each platform, or writing complex scripts to monitor IT environments, that is sure to lead to bottlenecks and problems. IMaaS tracks all of your IT infrastructure, giving you a bird’s eye view of your assets, and it is this flexibility that allows you to know exactly what is going on at any moment
• Track and Plan – not only does IMaaS enable you to monitor your entire IT performance, it allows you to plan capacity – people and systems. This is becoming more important as companies go into the Cloud, or adopt a virtualization strategy, but also because business and IT are inextricably linked – one needs the other. With IMaaS, you will have a dashboard providing a complete view of your entire IT system in real-time, AND have historical data so you can plan for the future – which means you have proof for adding new services, employing more IT professionals, all backed up with real-time cost justifications

For SMEs IMaaS is a Win-Win – seriously.

We’d be very happy to speak with you about IMaaS in more detail. So if you’ve had enough of the ad-hoc approach you’ve been forced to take towards IT monitoring, please do give us a call. We’ve got a cost-effective solution that is going to blow your socks off – we promise J

Cheers

The NetGain Team