Remote monitoring & maintenance is a standard term for a common service in the IT business, but what does it mean from the other side? Let’s break it down a little.
Maybe the biggest piece is monitoring updates. Companies like Microsoft and Quicken do frequent updates to their software as part of keeping it relevant and functional. Some of them are patches to cover security flaws, others are to add new capabilities or change the way existing ones work. For a home user, these are both useful pretty much out of the gate- the value of new capabilities is much larger than the time value of becoming familiar with a new method.
But a business requires more stability than an individual does- between the cost of retraining multiple people, and the cost of lost business due to downtime, even minor changes can very quickly become expensive. And that’s not to mention the chance of a patch that doesn’t work correctly. Proper monitoring puts the security updates into effect right away, and keeps the function updates on hold until the business is ready for them.
Next week we’ll cover some of the other pieces in part 2.