The ever-increasing complexity of IT infrastructures makes sure that IT administrators need more and more effort to monitor and manage their environments.
In this article, we will try to explain the guidelines for picking the right support model for your infrastructure: traditional or modern ProActive Premium Support.
The main differentiator between these two models is…agility. Something crucial in the modern world of IT, wouldn’t you say? Traditional support basically means responding to late night or weekend support calls from your boss coming out of the blue and trying to fix the problem. The support chain here is quite long: you have to find the root cause, submit a support ticket (and if you can’t find the exact reason you’ll have to submit tickets to multiple vendors), and then wait for a response. Moreover, if the issue is complex, third-party vendors might get involved, often resulting in finger-pointing and additional time wasted for fixing the problem. Meanwhile… all this time your company’s IT infrastructure is still experiencing a serious issue or even downtime! And only as soon as the vendor completes all the necessary steps and makes you jump through all the hoops (might take a while depending on the problem), you can renew your business operations.
With ProActive Premium Support, the whole process becomes…well, there’s no such process at all. You just perform your daily tasks or drink coffee. In the meantime, ProActive Premium Support Monitoring and Analytics service informs our support team about potential issues, allowing us to resolve them way before they appear. So, what you ultimately get is a solution, not a problem.
Machines are now taking care of complex infrastructures, not humans. Think that’s bad? Ask an IT administrator in any SMB or Enterprise company. In the first case, administrator has lots of other important tasks to deal with, and IT administration may be somewhere between “not his main job” and “priority 335”. In Enterprise level companies, IT administrators are simply showered with daily tasks. They value their time and don’t want to be on call 24/7 for any little issues in the IT infrastructure.
In both cases, an IT administrator simply has no time for sitting in front of the screen and constantly checking the system’s health. Monitoring and fixing issues is not his main job, and it shouldn’t be! No one wants to be chained to their IT infrastructure.
So, what is the solution? StarWind ProActive Premium Support. It revolutionizes the way support works. It’s actually the most reasonable way to support modern IT with all its growing complexity. Predict failures and address them before they occur. Give administrators a peace of mind allowing them not to worry about their infrastructure. Allow them to regain the time that was previously consumed on monitoring and fixing things.
There is no need to fix things if you prevent them from breaking. It’s much better to drive your car knowing that any issue will be solved proactively instead of getting stuck in the middle of nowhere and trying to repair it.
Apparently, not everyone needs ProActive Premium Support. For example, a Superadmin who knows his storage inside out and has enough time to fix any IT infrastructure himself even if you wake him up in the middle of the night. Of course, he should have his own existing and properly configured monitoring and analytics engine running in the infrastructure just to avoid working 24/7/365.
Another case is a customer whose SLAs allow having his production down for more than a day. He’s not in a rush and has all time in the world to fix the old DIY cluster he built.
So, the traditional support model is fine if you have enough time for the constant monitoring of your environment or a decent monitoring and analytics engine. Otherwise, you really need ProActive Premium Support where AI will do all the monitoring for you, and a team of professionals will resolve any issue before it becomes major. So, save your time and efforts and go for ProActive Premium Support!
