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Technology serves as the backbone of businesses across industries, driving efficiency, innovation, and growth. However, simply adopting the latest tech solutions is not enough to ensure success. To truly harness the benefits of technology, businesses must prioritize ongoing maintenance and support. So, let’s dive into the importance of maintaining technology infrastructure, and what the ratio of maintenance to new projects should look like in a typical organizational budget.
Maximizing Operational Efficiency
Regular maintenance of technology systems ensures that they operate at peak efficiency, minimizing downtime and disruptions. Whether it’s updating software, patching security vulnerabilities, or optimizing network performance, proactive maintenance measures help businesses maintain smooth operations and maximize productivity. There is a rule of thumb to old “maintenance” of existing systems to induction of new and optimized in yearly IT budgets. If between 50 – 70% of your budget is spent maintaining what you have (and this includes salary and outsourcing), it’s OK. Employees can only sustain so much change, so the introduction of new processes, systems, or applications, which often means retraining current practices, must be considered in organizational health. New technology initiatives in the range of 25% – 40% of the budget are considered optimal for a business or nonprofit in managing and optimizing operations. This provides a level of change and keeping it fresh that is required beyond maintaining current systems.
Enhancing Cybersecurity
Cyber threats are on the rise, posing a significant risk to businesses of all sizes. Regular maintenance and updates are crucial for ensuring that systems are fortified against evolving security threats. From installing security patches to implementing robust firewall configurations, proactive cybersecurity maintenance measures are essential for safeguarding sensitive data and protecting against cyber-attacks.
Supporting Business Growth
As businesses evolve and expand, their technological needs evolve as well. Regular maintenance ensures that technology infrastructure can scale seamlessly to accommodate growing demands. Whether it’s upgrading hardware, expanding network capacity, or integrating new software solutions, proactive maintenance measures pave the way for business growth and innovation.
Improving Customer Experience
Technology plays a pivotal role in shaping the customer experience. From seamless online transactions to responsive customer support systems, businesses rely on technology to deliver exceptional service. Regular maintenance ensures that customer-facing technology solutions are reliable, secure, and optimized for performance, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Reducing Total Cost of Ownership
While investing in technology is essential for business success, it’s equally important to manage ongoing costs. Regular maintenance helps businesses identify and address issues before they escalate into costly problems. Loss of employee productivity is a major component in less responsive, back-level technology, which slows your team down. The IT team should be able to prove the improvement in tangible and intangible benefits by providing a cost-benefit analysis. The objective is to reduce the total cost of ownership and achieve better ROI on technology investments, and a benefits analysis will do that empirically so the CFO and financial team are happy!
At Twin State Technical Services, we have moved into using RPA technology to automate many of the routine work that makes processes flow better. The human eye may miss a warning, but a screen can aggregate those, and even perform a routine, necessary action. Here, we are using that technology to provide escalation points and reminders and create reporting and logging for error corrections. Some of the ways you may see this work are in patch management, proof of corrections in a standard report, and communications provided by the Twin State Operations Support Team. From proactive monitoring and troubleshooting to software updates and security enhancements, call in on anything you see or question – we will always work together to ensure technology infrastructure remains secure, efficient, and resilient.
Maintaining technology infrastructure is paramount for business success in today’s digital landscape. By prioritizing proactive maintenance and support, we can see and prove that these activities will improve operational efficiency, enhance security, and support your growth initiatives with an improved customer experience. When this happens, the total cost of technology ownership is driven down.
If you have additional questions, Twin State can help. Contact us here. We Got You!!
