The cost of not using IT support: an example

This example is drawn from real life!

A small company in Bristol felt that they were too small to employ an IT support company.

After all, they had only nine employees, and no fewer than three of them were 'techies'. They had set up the company's e-mail and internal servers, and each colleague had faith in their skills to mend any IT issues.

What's more, there was a general belief in the invincibility of their carefully chosen IT hardware and cloud-based backup services.

The problem began when the first employee with IT skills went on maternity leave. Being a small company they decided to soldier on without her for now, passing the unofficial 'systems administrator' designation to a second colleague.

This second colleague knew plenty about software and Windows, but little about networks and virus prevention. And the third colleague with IT knowledge was away on holiday when a harmless-looking link, apparently from a friend, arrived via a popular instant messenger programme on one staff member's PC.

The link, of course, caused a virus to be installed, which went undiscovered until it infected 3 of their laptop computers. Taking the three machines out of action to remove the virus resulted in a short term loss of productivity.

However, what was worse is that the following week, when the third IT-trained colleague returned from holiday, an e-mail server outage disrupted the company's ability to send and receive mails. The two employees naturally suspected that this problem was caused by the virus and spent a further two days looking without success for a solution.

In the end, a hired network support engineer established that it was an unrelated problem and applied a fix - but not before a total of two e-mail days had been lost and a £900 bill had been run up for emergency IT support.

Why a company providing IT support in Bristol could have helped avoid disaster

The first thing to point out is that IT support need not be expensive for small firms. With a fixed-price monthly support package, they could have been paying a regular monthly amount that would have allowed them to call a Chorus IT engineer at the first sign of the virus problem.

The second thing that could have helped the firm was remote network monitoring, provided as part of the standard IT support package, that could have detected their network issue and fixed it remotely before the problem even surfaced.

The most important matter is the cost: instead of two days without e-mail, three days for two employees without their PCs and a £900 bill, they could have been operating seamlessly during an already stressful time as they called on up-to-the-minute, multidisciplinary IT support expertise at no added cost to their monthly subscription.

Chorus IT has been providing Bristol companies with IT support for ten years and can answer any questions you might have about whether IT support is necessary for your business. Call us on 01275 398900 for more information on avoiding costly IT disasters!