For most business owners, the answers to these questions remain a mystery (a preference shared by most IT staff members). With little knowledge about the activities necessary to maintain a healthy computing environment, most business owners and managers trust network administrators and support staff to remain focused and work efficiently. In many cases, however, systems and networks require relatively little care and feeding on a daily basis. Network administrators may find themselves wandering between tasks or focusing on tasks with little potential benefit.

The following are eight steps you can take to better understand and organize on-going network and system administration activities.

1. Create and follow a Systems Administration Plan: By mapping out the daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly tasks necessary for smooth day-to-day operations and management, along with documented procedures, you establish clear expectations with respect to tasks and workload. You also gain the ability to more easily provide coverage for vacations and illnesses.
2. Maintain logs of system changes: Reviewing system change logs provides insight into administrative and support activities, while also providing a tool for problem analysis and resolution.
3. Implement Windows Systems Update Service (WSUS): This tool provides a central console for distributing Microsoft updates, eliminating the need to manage updates from each and every server, workstation, and laptop.
4. Deploy network monitoring and event management tools: With useful tools costing hundreds (instead of tens of thousands) of dollars, the upfront investment to setup event and trend monitoring will eliminate time-consuming, manual health checks for individual servers and systems.
5. Leverage managed services: Managed services remove hardware and software configuration and maintenance from the equation of providing information services to your business. Spam protection, security monitoring, and backup/archive services are prime candidates.
6. Publish and maintain an IS Usage Policy: Many large and small problems result from inadvertent (or deliberate) bad behavior. The education, and enforcement, that accompanies a well-written IS Usage Policy will prevent numerous problems big and small.
7. Establish standard system configurations: With standard configurations, automation tools can shorten system installations and updates from hours to minutes. Also, rebuilding systems to standard configurations is faster and more effectively than manually cleaning systems of the cyber-junk that impedes performance and reliability over time.
8. Empower users to self-manage services: Provide users the ability to self-manage services, particularly those for which the users are better able to make business decisions. Through managed services, MS Outlook add-ins, offline folder settings, and other utilities, users manage spam, email backups, and documents more efficiently than your IS staff.

We guarantee that we will provide tangible, pragmatic, and achievable recommendations intended to help your bottom line through improved business efficiency; increased effectiveness of your information services; and/or enhanced performance / availability / reliability of your information technology.

A fixed-price service, the Information Services Assessment is a productive, affordable way to create value for your business while sampling Horizon’s services.

Interested in past issues? Click here for the archives.