Yesterday, our helpdesk received an urgent request from a desperate client who had suffered a critical server outage sometime over the weekend. Now while we have sat down on many occasions with the local manager of this international client to share our vision on proactive managed services, they still prefer a break/fix type of arrangement. Hey that’s OK, not something we do a lot of these days but I have always held out hope they would see the light.
So after a quick call by one of our technicians we realised it required us onsite to resolve. This leaves the client without critical services and the employees twiddling their thumbs - at least until we get there. 2 hours later our technician arrives onsite to discover 2 SCSI drives out of an array of redundant disks dead, and no way to recover but from backup. More downtime.
Luckily we have a pretty good DR system in place for this customer, and came prepared with some alternate drives. The sad part of the story is this could have all been avoided with proactive systems management in place.
Our proactive managed services would have alerted us weeks ago that a single drive was going to or had failed in that server, which is designed to cope with one drive failure. We would have sourced and replaced that defective drive inside 24 hours with no downtime to the client or their employees. When the second drive failed, the same process would have occurred – no downtime. This is a far better outcome than the reality they are facing now which is a day’s worth of lost productivity (were still recovering from backup as I type) and a rather large bill for something that was completely avoidable.
I have a feeling the next time I sit down with this client to talk about fixed fee proactive managed services, the outcome will be different.
Jason Childs
I.T. Services Director
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