How to Maximize Uptime for Patient Care with a NOC Services Solution

Unscheduled downtime is the number one cause of lost revenue. According to  a Ponemon Institute study, the cost of one minute of downtime reached as high as $17,244 in 2016, assuming a 40-employee company. IBM, IDC, Gartner and others have each offered their estimates, but no matter which you accept, it’s clear that  downtime is expensive—both from the standpoint of lost sales opportunities, but also due to the cost of idle time among your employees who are unable to do their work.

The best way to avoid unexpected downtime is to prevent it from happening in the first place. Outages don’t stick to a 9-to-5 schedule. Simply checking your monitoring software when you get to the office each day isn’t enough. An anomaly that occurred last night might well have taken your network or some segments of it out of service.

24×7 network monitoring automatically detects potential problems and sends alerts so that your NOC can act.  You may not have the staff to cover all 24 hours each day, and that’s where outsourcing to a professional NOC gives you an SLA-guaranteed network operation.

24×7 Network Monitoring is an Early Warning System

First, take note that not every alert means a node or a segment is out of service. Oftentimes, an alert signals a symptom that points to a larger problem. For instance, if the hard drive on an email server is signaling that it’s nearing its capacity, that alert gives you the information you need to upgrade the hard drive before it fails, brings down the company’s entire email system, and creates a major disruption to employees, customers, vendors, and other stakeholders.

Potential issues or performance bottlenecks are revealed as soon as they occur. You get an early warning when network engineers monitor your network continuously, as well as the potential for the  NOC engineers to solve the problem before it does damage. Simply put: With 24×7 monitoring, your network maintains peak performance even while your team is at home and asleep.

Greater Efficiency Levels

Receiving alerts as they’re issued allows a network engineer to act immediately and prevent disruption to your work force so they can maintain their high levels of productivity and customer service.

Every network occasionally needs to be taken out of service so that updates and patches can be installed. Continuous monitoring allows you to plan for such scheduled downtime, thus avoiding unnecessary disruption during peak hours.

Scale with Demand

Your business has likely grown in the past year, and you’ll want it to grow more over the next year—whether the cause is seasonality or simply the solid, organic growth every business strives for. Continuous monitoring shows you where demands on the network spike, giving you the data, you need to make sure your infrastructure can keep pace with that growth.

Perhaps best of all, outsourcing your network monitoring gives you the intelligence you need to scale your network almost without limit, and without adding more employees.

Outsourcing your 24×7 network monitoring means you get all of these added benefits without the time and expense of having to research and select the best network monitoring software, then installing and maintaining it yourself. And yes, without the cost of having to hire new employees.

Predict and Mitigate Future Events

Managed IT utilizes different solutions that keep your tech up-to-date and trouble-free. Preventative maintenance is the core of many high-quality managed IT solutions and provides services and advantages that are hard to get otherwise. Understanding preventative maintenance will help to ensure that your information is protected and keeps your network from giving out on you unexpectedly. In this way, managed IT support provides a higher level of success by decreasing the dangers of potential network failures. 

Thankfully, a skilled managed IT firm can provide the long-term solutions that you need to keep your network fully operational. They can schedule various kinds of preventative maintenance to keep you protected from long-term complications. Understanding these options will help you choose one that works for your needs and your budget. 

Sparkhound’s NOC and Health Monitoring Services

Our unique management platforms provide proactive monitoring of our broadband service—both wireless and wire line, proactive 24×7 NOC management, hardware break/fix, web portal access, change/configuration management and performance monitoring

Our PCI-compliant NOC services hosts a range of enterprise management systems so customers can rent “virtual instances” rather than spend precious capital on owning their own management platforms. Reach out to us today and we can dispatch a team to assess how to your organizations can get the most out of NOC Services.