In today’s digital world, servers play a crucial role in keeping your business running smoothly. Having a server helps employees to store, access, and exchange data from any workstation; be it from an office or home. However, businesses also need to ensure that their servers are monitored, updated, and well-maintained on a regular basis, so as to ensure its proper working.

So, before moving on to discussing the importance of having a server maintenance plan, let us have a quick look at what a server is and why is it important for businesses.

Importance of Server for your Business

A server is computer hardware or software whose primary task is to provide resources, programs, or data service to other systems. With servers, businesses can store all critical information at one central place, which can be then accessed, shared, and managed anytime by the employees of the organization. With just an internet-enabled PC, employees can work from anywhere, anytime, thereby ensuring better efficiency and productivity.

In short, servers have actually revolutionized the way businesses used to work.

What is Server Maintenance?

Server maintenance involves upgrading the server software to ensure the smooth running of a computer network. Regular maintenance can help prevent network failures and avoid data loss. Server maintenance may include tasks such as,

  • A thorough examination of the network.
  • Checking server log files for any security alerts and issues.
  • Maintaining a data backup system to retrieve data easily in case of any failures.
  • Checking hard disk space.
  • Monitoring server temperature to prevent overheating of servers.
  • Identifying potential security risks and vulnerabilities.
  • Carrying out critical software updates.
  • Installing security patches.

However, Server maintenance isn’t that easy like it seems. To ensure successful server maintenance, businesses first need to create a server maintenance plan specifically designed for their business needs.

An efficient server maintenance plan helps businesses to reduce the cost of server maintenance. It also allows businesses to achieve their business goals.

Now let’s move onto discussing why the server maintenance plan is important.

Importance of Having a Server Maintenance Plan

Servers require full-time attention for smooth and efficient running. A proper server maintenance plan helps keeps your business operating efficiently. A properly maintained server will also have very little downtime. Here are some of the benefits of having a server maintenance plan for your business,

Regular Data Backups

Servers do sometimes crash. Even Google faced a similar kind of issue recently. Hence, Server backup is an essential task, that needs to be carried out on a regular basis, so as to prevent data loss in case of any failure. Having a proper server maintenance plan ensures regular backup of your business data. Having a proper data backup plan can also make the data migration process easier. It will help you save both time and cost.

Enhanced Security

Servers are vulnerable to attacks. As a result, security is a key element and needs to be ensured on a regular basis to keep your business data protected from outsiders. A proper server maintenance plan helps keep your server updated and prevents attackers from gaining access to your network. It helps identify potential security risks and vulnerabilities, thereby allowing administrators to timely intervene and get the issues resolved.

Visit – Server Auditing, to know about the server security auditing services we provide.

Remote Monitoring

In order to ensure maximum uptime and optimum performance, monitoring the server performance 24/7 is crucial. In the current digital world, it is necessary to have a solution through which professionals can monitor the server performance 24x7x365. Having the right server maintenance plan helps you in achieving just that. Event log monitoring, performance monitoring, application monitoring, internal audit reports, asset management are some of the services that come under remote monitoring.

Stay Protected Against Virus Attacks

Virus attacks can have a significant impact on your business operations leading to loss of data and monetary loss. Installing the latest security software patches and examining the security features regularly helps in early detection and keeps your system protected from the spread of viruses.
Visit our page to know about the server security services we offer.

How Often do Servers Need to be Maintained?

We have already discussed the need for server maintenance to keep them updated and running smoothly. However, do you know how often servers need to be maintained? Well, most businesses still don’t have an exact idea about that matter.

When it comes to server maintenance, there are some factors that need to be assessed on a daily basis, while some can be monitored weekly or monthly.

Daily Maintenance

Checking for updates should be the first and most important part of the maintenance activities and it should be done daily. Virus scanners, critical software updates, security log monitoring, server temperature check, RAID health, server load monitoring are some of the factors that need to assessed and fixed on a daily basis.

Weekly Activities

Verifying data backups, disk usage is some of the other factors that need to be assessed every week,

Monthly Maintenance

Fixing issues associated with database optimization can be done on a monthly basis.

How to Build an Ideal Server Maintenance Plan?

An ideal server maintenance plan is your key to having a fast, secure, and safe server. The first and foremost thing when it comes to creating a server maintenance plan is to classify the maintenance activities based on objectives and goals. Reactive server maintenance plan, preventive server maintenance plan, predictive server maintenance plan are the 3 categories that we need to consider while creating an ideal server maintenance plan.

Reactive Server Maintenance Plan

The plan involves activities carried out at the time of any emergencies like restoring equipment to normal operating conditions when something goes wrong.

Preventive Server Maintenance Plan

This plan involves steps taken to prevent possible issues from occurring. This kind of maintenance service falls in between reactive maintenance and predictive maintenance.

Predictive Server Maintenance Plan

This plan highlights the steps taken to detect anomalies in the operation of the server.

You need to consider the parameters associated with each of the plans along with your business needs and requirements while preparing the right maintenance plan.

If you don’t have much experience in handling server-related issues, it would be better to hire a dedicated server administrator to take care of your server needs.

Conclusion

As we have already discussed, server maintenance is one of the most vital parts of every business in today’s digital world. Any business that make use of a server must ensure that their servers are performing as expected. Carrying out service maintenance activities on a regular basis is one of the many ways to keep your server running smoothly all the time. Creating the right plan depends on your specific requirements and needs, which you must figure out initially.

If your server is in trouble and needs maintenance or support, contact us to know how we can be of help to you.