The Elephant in the Server Room: 3 IT Needs Businesses Shouldn't Ignore

“The elephant in the room” has long been used as an analogy for a blatantly obvious problem that everyone is hesitant, if not unwilling, to acknowledge. Many companies find that they have elephants like these in their server rooms. Today, we’ll discuss some of these metaphorical elephants and how your company can get rid of them.

Outdated Server Software
A business’ server is the highway that connects each workstation to each other and allows them to share data and information. As such, it is important to make sure the software that controls your server remains updated. Otherwise, to continue the highway metaphor, you are apt to encounter congestion and traffic jams.

Updating your server also helps protect you against cyberattacks. Threats are always evolving and being improved upon, which means that defenses that may have stopped one attack are by no means guaranteed to stop the next. Keeping your servers up-to-date is essential if you are to have a fighting chance against hackers and malware.

Performing Regular Server Maintenance
You may be saying “Wait a minute, didn’t we just go over how I need to maintain my server’s software?” However, your server depends on more than just its software--there’s hardware to take care of as well.

Server maintenance requires a few different activities to take place every once in a while in order to care for the physical components your company’s internal network relies on. Dust can be a big problem for any IT components, which makes it all the more important to keep dust and debris away from your server. After all, each part of your business likely leverages that server in one way or another, so if it goes down, so do business operations.

It is also important to remember that technology doesn’t last forever, and so your server’s drives will need to be replaced on occasion. Making these maintenance efforts part of a regular routine will help your servers to work better, for longer.

Virtualization
Oftentimes, a business’ processes will require multiple applications to be running at once. Over the course of time, this may have led to your business running multiple servers to perform the various functions and running your line-of-business applications. This leads to multiple high-end devices that require maintenance and support, not to mention electricity and cooling. Instead of housing multiple servers, in most cases it is more cost-effective to run multiple virtual servers on a single device.

By partition off a more powerful server, that one server can then host multiple operating systems with its own resources. As a result, instead of a business needing to run multiple servers at a fraction of their capacity, a business can utilize one server to fulfill their needs.

Your server cannot be an out-of-sight, out-of-mind resource. It has to be an elephant that someone points out and attends to. SCW is in the business of dealing with metaphorical elephants like these. For assistance with your IT infrastructure and its needs, call us at (509) 534-1530.