Proactive IT Support can literally save your business, whether it be from preventing losing a tender due to technical issues, to making sure your backups will come to the rescue if you get hit by ransomware.

It is highly recommended that your IT support provider offers a proactive rather than reactive service. The most common proactive service with an IT Provider is called a Managed Service Agreement (MSA).

In construction you need to make sure your machinery is maintained and won’t break down when you need it the most. Well the same goes with IT, and that is accomplished by partnering with an IT Provider that offers that Managed Service Agreement.

They will monitor and maintain all your IT equipment, from laptops to the network and backup devices.

What can happen if your IT systems aren’t monitored and maintained?

Let’s have a look at once such example. We have a construction client that calls us from time to time. They like to manage IT themselves and call us when there is an urgent need. This is what we call ad hoc support, or sometimes referred to as break/fix.

They called us in a panic one morning – nothing could be accessed on their server!

After some initial investigation, the prognosis wasn’t good – they had been hit by ransomware. One of their staff members had opened a malicious attachment in an email and a virus spread throughout their network. The virus had locked all the files on the server and a message was now appearing asking for a ransom to unlock the files, hence the name “Ransomware”.

In these situations, there are 2 common options. The most common and safe option is overwriting all the locked files with your back up files. That is if your backups are working.

The second option, and the one to use as a last resort, is to pay the ransom to have your files unlocked again. This can be an expensive exercise, with the average payment around AUD 300,000. There is no guarantee you will get your data back either, about 20% of the time it won’t work.

In the case of this client’s example, we immediately turned off the network to stop the spread of the ransomware to the backup system. Ransomware can lock the backups as well, forcing businesses to consider paying the ransom.

Had the ransomware already got into the backups? Were the backups working? The client managed their own backups, so we weren’t entirely confident.

As it turned out, the backups hadn’t been managed properly. They were using an old-school system where they rotated a USB drive and took one offsite everyday so there was always a good backup outside of the office in case of a disaster. The only problem was, they hadn’t rotated the USB drives in 3 months! This meant that if the ransomware had destroyed the current backup plugged into the server, they wouldn’t have an up-to-date offsite backup to rely on.

Fortunately, the ransomware hadn’t got into the backups as we stopped the spread of the ransomware in time. We were able to retore their data and a very thankful client was able to continue running their business.

They were so close to experiencing a devasting blow to their business. They were moments away from losing their entire data system and the alternative options were very expensive.

How would this scenario differ if they’d had proactive IT Support? Well, it’s highly likely the event would never have happened in the first place.

Why? Firstly, with monitoring and maintenance on a proactive MSA they would have had managed anti-spam software running to delete that malicious email in the first place.

If in the unlikely event that the virus made it’s way on the server, a managed anti-virus could have blocked access to the files.

If that didn’t work, the backups would have come to the rescue because they would be monitored and maintained, ensuring the most recent versions of all files were ready and waiting in the wings.

So, as you can see, the monitoring and maintenance aspect of IT Support is critical, not only to save your construction business during an IT disaster, but to increase productivity as well.

Something that really drives productivity is called RMM, it stands for Remote Management and Monitoring. This refers to software that constantly monitors computers, servers and the network and provides fixes when there is an issue.

Consider the time it takes for an employee to experience an issue on their computer, firstly slowing their work down, then calling helpdesk, then waiting for IT to fix the issue. This could take days depending on the issue, not to mention the interruptions when IT needs to connect to the computer and troubleshoot with the employee.

Compare this to RMM. It can find the issue, usually before the employee even notices it’s there and fix it in the background. How much more productive will the employee be now?

The bottom line is, if you want your construction business to be as productive and safe as possible, make sure your IT partner is providing proactive support with monitoring and maintenance included. This will generally be included in a Managed Service Agreement. Finally, you’ll need to check that you have RMM as that is a game changer for employee productivity and will ensure you are getting a great ROI for your IT investment.