Regular IT maintenance

Manage your networkRegular IT maintenance will help your business IT systems run more smoothly and make them less likely to break down, ensuring effective performance and reducing support costs.

Alongside computer systems maintenance, businesses can benefit from taking a regular look at their IT policies, procedures and documentation. And yes, although this may not sound fun, it’s one of those jobs that can prevent major headaches in the future.

Basic IT maintenance

Basic IT maintenance (‘housekeeping’) should include archiving old material, deleting redundant files to free up space and defragmenting hard drives so things can be accessed more quickly.

As you’d expect, failing to perform tasks like these is unlikely to lead to immediate disaster. However, neglecting them for long periods can cause niggly problems, slow systems and a create shortage of space for new files. And as anyone who has to wait an age for their computer to switch on every morning will tell you, when small issues are neglected, they become big ones.

Computer systems maintenance and security

As well as keeping on top of general computer systems maintenance, businesses need to make sure they perform regular security-related IT maintenance. Failing to do this can have a direct impact on the security of IT systems and crucial business data.

Security IT maintenance tasks include performing regular scans for viruses and spyware, backing up data frequently (ideally, you should take a back up of everything that’s changed since the last back up, every day) and changing passwords every month or two.

With the wealth of useful free tools to protect your business, there’s no excuse for failing on security. The web browser is a central focus for cyber crime and its vulnerabilities are commonly exploited, particularly when users visit a malicious website.