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Justifying Scheduled Maintenance For IT Infrastructure

The benefits of regularly scheduled maintenance are worth the difficulty of selling this service.

Toronto, Ontario April 24, 2004--In recent years, IT Service companies have begun to push their client corporations to schedule regular "maintenance" procedures on their IT infrastructure.

In many cases, this has proven to be a hard sell, despite the obvious benefits.

According to Jeremy Lichtman, a senior consultant at MIT Consulting (www.mitconsulting.ca), "the justification for a regular monthly maintenance process is to reduce the overall cost of ownership for a company's IT infrastructure."

"However, it is often harder to justify an ongoing cost, as opposed to situational costs relating to repairs, even when the cost is lower. The hardest companies to sell this concept to are those where every dollar spent on infrastructure must be accounted for. It is always easier to justify fixing something that is broken than to prevent it from breaking in the first place."

He further stated that the key to selling clients on the benefits of regular maintenance operations is to "sell them on the benefits and on the bottom line."

Monthly maintenance tasks, including removal of viruses and malware, updating of operating systems and defensive software, registry testing and other similar activities, result in problems being discovered before they effect the usage of the computer. Problems such as viruses frequently take several hours to repair after they occur; this does not even take into account the potential damage to files that cannot be recovered.

Running tests on a monthly basis can also reduce the incidence of systems failure dramatically, resulting in higher uptime on computers and lower maintenance requirements.

The benefit of regularly scheduled maintenance is thus two-fold: lower cost of operations, plus lower down time due to problems.

For additional information, contact: Jeremy Lichtman

MIT Consulting is an IT Service company and vendor of turnkey reporting applications for the financial sector.

The company has successfully implemented reporting tools for several international insurance companies.