Anderson Technologies’ Junior Systems Administrator Quentin Topping sits down with Libby Powers to talk about the little things a managed IT services provider does every day to protect from big disasters. Sometimes, things like insurance and maintenance can seem useless, but insuring your business against potential disaster is something you’ll wish you’d done before the worst happens.
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Transcript
Libby Powers: Hi, everybody! Welcome to another edition of Byte-Size Tech. I am joined with Quentin today. He’s one of our Junior System Admins. Quentin, you want to introduce yourself?
Quentin Topping: As Libby said, I’m Quentin Topping. I am a Junior Systems Administrator here at Anderson Technologies. I deal with all our on-the-ground computer work.
Libby Powers: He’s very much in the trenches every day with making sure that our clients are receiving the best level of support possible. And honestly, kind of what you do is to make sure that they’re not calling in to us because we’re proactively figuring out what’s going on with them and, if there’s an issue, just taking care of it.
Quentin Topping: Exactly, I would much rather keep you from having an issue at all then have to try and fix something.
Libby Powers: Awesome! So something that Quentin and I were discussing is insurance. We have insurance for many things: we have insurance on our house, we have insurance on our car, some of us may have insurance on our pets, so there’s some truth for many reasons. And why we use that insurance, or why we pay for that insurance, is because we want to make sure that in the case of something happening, we’re going to be covered. Correct?
Quentin Topping: Exactly.
Libby Powers: Okay. Something I was telling Quentin is several years ago, I had a house fire, and it was a total loss. And four days before the house fire, I was able to sign homeowner’s insurance, which took care of a lot, not the memories but those things that we lost, like clothes and stuff like that. We equate that with what we do. We are your insurance for anything: data loss, ransomware… Can you talk a little bit about that?
Quentin Topping: Yeah, absolutely. Preventative maintenance is as much of what we do as active repair and active maintenance. When you call in about your Outlook working or your programs not working, our goal is to also try and prevent those issues from ever arising. IT management is about prevention, recovery, and active maintenance.
Libby Powers: What are some of the things that you do on an ongoing basis that would be this preventative maintenance, kind of like changing the smoke detector in your house?
Quentin Topping: We like to check your system to make sure it’s up to date, we like to make sure all of your programs are up to date, we actively monitor ongoing security threats that are known throughout the country, and we actively take the steps to make sure your system is not rolling the ball to those common threats.
Libby Powers: Something that Quentin said to me which I really liked was we are kind of your fire department that would you would call and say “I have an issue.” But instead of the entire fire department coming, they would just be able to put out the fire from wherever they were. Now we know that’s not going to happen with an actual fire, but if you’re having a meltdown in your business, just think of being able to call somebody who could fix that in a moment’s notice. Right?
Quentin Topping: Exactly, that’s the joy of the computer world we live in. We can, with a press of a button, turn everything back to the way it was. Recovery is just as much a part of prevention as actively monitoring threats. We—a lot of places—will provide the ability to recover your data. So if your system goes down, you lose access to your email, we can recover that to the last state we had it in. An analogy I told you before is like if the fire department had a copy of your house saved at the fire station they could provide to you after it burned down.
Libby Powers: Oh gosh, wouldn’t that be handy? Who knows, with 3D printing these days, who knows what’s going to come about. Anyway, we hope you understand why having a managed IT company work with you and proactively monitoring your IT infrastructure and security is really important, not only for your business, but for all of your data. I appreciate you joining me today, Quentin. Hopefully we can do this again. Reach out to us at any time. Thanks so much. Have a great day. Bye.
