What Is IT Service Monitoring and Why Is It Important?

Properly managing your company's network is one of the most important obligations you have as an entrepreneur. Otherwise, you run the risk of various consequences, such as inefficient performance or data breaches. One of the best tools you can implement is active IT monitoring, but not everybody understands the benefits it provides.

Let's explore everything that you should know about service monitoring and how it can help your business.

So, What Exactly Is It Service Monitoring?

As the name implies, IT monitoring is the practice of constantly surveying a network in the anticipation of problems arising. To elaborate, service providers look for anomalies within the network itself and aim to detect them as quickly as possible. Without active monitoring services in place, businesses are at risk of a large number of different contingencies.

For this reason, it's imperative that your organization consider integrating this solution.

Why Is It Important?

It should come as no surprise that IT service monitoring is important for a large number of reasons.

Understanding this information will allow you to make the best decision when it comes to integrating this service into your company. Let's explore some of the most notable that you need to be aware of.

Improve Your Bottom Line

When your company's internal teams don't need to spend as much time on IT monitoring, they can become much more efficient. More specifically, their productivity will translate into increased performance throughout your organization.

This is particularly useful for smaller companies. On average, smaller organizations simply do not have the manpower to spare. Even allocating one or two employees to IT management could significantly detract from your other key processes.

However, it's important to note that even larger organizations can suffer from this. Outsourcing to professionals is a great way to take the load off of your own teams and let a specialist handle it.

Establish Network Reliability

Having a reliable network can often be the difference between whether or not you are able to hit certain metrics.

You may also negatively impact your customer experience. For example, businesses that need to constantly run at optimum efficiency often can't afford server downtime. Unfortunately, a lack of active monitoring could prevent you from foreseeing when certain thresholds will be crossed.

To clarify, many entrepreneurs aren't familiar with the warning signs that a server will experience issues. The same can often be said for inexperienced IT employees. Establishing a comprehensive level of network reliability will show your audience that they can depend on your performance.

Keep this in mind when moving forward.

Performance Monitoring

If you don't track your capabilities, you will be able to make improvements. For example, let's assume somebody is trying to get stronger in the gym or lose bodyweight.

Having no index of where they start could prevent them from making the progress they require. The same can be said about not tracking certain metrics, which in these scenarios would be the weight lifted and the pounds lost. The same principle can apply to IT service monitoring.

If you don't have a professional capable of interpreting your analytics, you won't know exactly how you are performing. It's always in your best interest to increase your performance over time.

Unless you have a significant amount of experience in managing your IT activities, you will likely fall short of your goals. This is especially true given the fact that technology is always getting faster.

These new technological advancements come with a greater potential to work at an increased pace. This also means that your users will be expecting a certain level of performance from your brand.

Professional Compliance

Maintaining compliance with industry regulations is essential.

In fact, a failure to do so can easily bring about legal consequences. This is particularly true for those who work in the tech or healthcare sectors.

To clarify, let's assume that your business must adhere to the standards imposed by HIPAA. Now, let's also assume that a data breach occurs at your organization.

If it can be concluded that your business was negligent and following the standards, the patients who were impacted by the data breach could file a lawsuit against you. This same scenario could arise in more conventional settings, such as with financial institutions.

In fact, most of us still remember the 2017 Equifax data breach and the aftermath that ensued. Professional monitoring services can guarantee that you remain compliant with any relevant standards that are in place. In some cases, this could even involve regulations issues you weren't aware of.

Since even a minor slipup could have catastrophic results, be sure to take this into consideration.

Detect Problems Early

More often than not, detecting problems early often determines how difficult they are for you to manage. In some cases, taking too long to discover underlying problems may increase the resources required to fix them.

Ideally, you would be able to discover issues as soon as they occur. As you might guess, this is something that is not possible without active monitoring. Not even the most efficient IT employee could protect you sufficiently.

This is simply due to the fact that this level of protection must be implemented 24/7. Outsourcing to a dedicated team will allow you to take advantage of this opportunity and keep your business as safe as possible.

As soon as you detect a potential issue, your service provider can also begin implementing a fix. In many cases, they may discover and resolve a problem before you ever know about it.

Having this peace of mind is something that can't be achieved through other means.

Discern Security Threats

As time goes on, hackers become more proficient at their jobs.

More specifically, the cybercrime industry as a whole will be worth over $10 trillion in the coming years. Much of this value will stem from compromised data that hackers steal from businesses.

This includes financial info, trade secrets, and intellectual property. Theft isn't the only concern, however. It's entirely possible for a hacker to steal sensitive information and then release it to your industry competitors.

Or, they might contact the press and allow the media to publicize your security flaws. Either scenario could cause irreparable damage to your organization. The main issue here is that most companies simply aren't aware of the threats they face.

In turn, this prevents them from protecting themselves sufficiently. IT monitoring allows you to instantly detect certain behavior. This includes unusual spikes in traffic, suspicious users, and other anomalies.

Having the capability to recognize potential threats is an invaluable asset that should never be overlooked.

Real-time Communication

You will have to wait for a phone call from your service provider in order to be alerted of potential issues.

Many providers (especially those who manage website hosting or dedicated servers) have a notification system in place that will help ensure you get the information you need. Real-time notifications are one of the most useful tools that you can take advantage of. This allows you to react as quickly as possible and take the necessary actions for your situation.

Of course, there's also something to be said about the convenience these notifications provide. Informative updates about your cloud servers, for example, are commonplace.

A Better Experience for Your Users

Providing the best possible experience to your users is imperative. Having a slow IT infrastructure is a guaranteed way to detract from the overall experience your users have. In many cases, this could easily cause them to turn to competitors instead.

You also run the risk of being unable to reacquire these users, as well. So, it's best to get things right from the beginning.

Of course, you also shouldn't neglect the possibility that more users may reach out to your support team. A common scenario would involve a slow-functioning site or one that is currently offline. If your support team is constantly flooded with these concerns, it could prevent you from handling more pressing issues.

Fortunately, a service monitoring professional can help you easily navigate this obstacle.

Organizing It Service Monitoring Is Essential

Not only can help keep your business safe, but it can also drastically improve your efficiency. Keep this in mind in the future so that you can make the choice about service monitoring that is best for your company.

Want to learn more about what we have to offer? Feel free to get in touch with us today and see how we can help.