Sometimes it’s amazing just how bad some IT support companies can be and still remain trading.
I recently visited a new client. They had a support contract with a company that offered remote and phone assistance, and also a bi-monthly support visit to maintain the servers. This had been in place for a few years.
On investigation of the servers, it showed that the exchange server was not being backed up at all – the communication between the Exchange server & the main server which hosted the backup drive was broken.
The servers had not been patched at all in over six months, were missing service packs from over a year ago, and were crashing an average of once a week. The DNS was configured incorrectly, causing long pauses in name resolution. The event logs were a mess, due in the main to an incomplete exchange migration & the DNS misconfiguration. The drivers hadn’t been updated since the server were installed.
Both the anti-spam and anti-virus license on the dedicated email protection appliance hadn’t been licensed for over 6 months, so lots of spam was getting through and email was unprotected.
The firewall and load-blancing device had been configured incorrectly, so only one dsl line was being used, and provided no failover.
It took a couple of days to put it all right, but now they have a system that doesn’t crash on a regular casis.
Another I recently visited were having problems logging into their server – of around 15 employees, only 5 could log in at any one time. Their IT providers suggested solution was to reinstall the server with a new operating system, at a cost of over five thousand pounds.
Upon a 5 minute inspection, it was clear than for whatever reason the software licenses had disappeared from the server, and just needed to be reinstalled – a 15 minute job. It also turned up the fact their backups hadn’t been working for over a year.
Computers networks are complex, and it can be easy for an unscrupulous salesman to baffle the uninitiated. When done right, a small business network adds huge productivity gains to your company, when wrong, they are nothing but a drain on resources.
If you’d like a second opinion on any proposal put to you by your IT support company, or just like a general check over of your systems, we’re happy to provide a couple of hours free consultancy to any local company. Just call on 0845 3889308.
unfortunately there are a lot of cowboys in business today. Many companies sign up with a firm and they do an ok job so they leave things. Little do they know that although the job is so-so their money could be better spent elsewhere and get a much better service and a better return on their investment.