We understand the need to trim costs.  We're doing it ourselves!  In these economic times, every dollar counts.  And as businesses review each line of their P&L, they pretty soon get to the IT costs.  When they do, we're more than happy to help review how to trim those - after all, thats something we do with our clients on a regular basis anyway.

One of the costs that people look at closely is regular system maintenance.  (Our monthly healthchecks).  Often the only tangible result of maintenance visit is a report, with a small number of recommendations.  So we understand when our client's question the value of this. 

We've had a couple of examples lately of why trimming this cost can be extremely expensive in the medium term.  You see, all those little recommendations add up to a stable system.  But lately, we've seen what happens when these don't happen. 

For one client, the system updates had backed up, and when they rebooted their server, it took quite a long time to apply them.  So long in fact that the client thought the server had frozen.  In frustration, they powered the server off and on, and that turned out to be a really bad thing.  We had to do an emergency rebuild of the server.  Then we've had a couple of clients find themselves without full backups - when a glitch occured, no one was checking so no one noticed, which meant that when the backups were needed, they weren't there.  And again, siginficant cost was incurred putting it back together with limited tools.  Other examples include a a failed UPS, which meant the server malfunctioned during a power cut.  Yet another client's system wasn't patched, and the antivirus wasn't up to scratch, so when they were infected, the virus spread like wildfire and cost a fortune to clean up.

These are really awful experiences for the clients concerned.  We do our damndest to help, and I know the clients appreciate it.  But no one welcomes an unexpected cost like these, nor the business impact of downtime.  The problem with regular system maintenance is that things go smoothly.  You don't see the problems that are being prevented, and the impact is hidden.  None of the problems described have ever occured to a client having regular system maintenance, as that's as close as we can come to proving a negative. 

So when you come to review your IT budgets, please remember that those regular system maintenance costs are a really good investment!