Computer maintenance is an essential tool for the good health of your company. It ensures the proper functioning of the equipment on which you work (Computer, server, printer etc.)
The computer maintenance often requires to call upon a provider who can be internal or external to your company. Don’t hesitate to ask for a freelance computer maintenance service provider!
There are many types of computer maintenance. We help you to choose the best solution.
What is computer maintenance?
The computer maintenance concerns the operations by which an operator or provider acts on your computer equipment, such as computers, printers, and any other tool necessary for the productivity of your teams, to keep them in good working order.
Depending on the type of computer maintenance chosen, it is possible that the service provider works to develop better solutions to improve the quality of the work of your collaborators as well as the efficiency of the actions they carry out.
The computer maintenance answers several objectives which aim to protect your working tools to preserve their performances, to update your computer system to remain competitive, and finally to improve your working comfort by correcting the possible breakdowns identified on your computer park.
Generally, computer maintenance is carried out through pre-established actions that aim to maintain your equipment in a routine manner. However, punctual actions can be necessary to intervene in an urgent way on the identified failures in order to prevent security breaches and possible data leakage.
There are three main types of IT maintenance that we will detail below. If each type of maintenance aims at carrying out particular actions, we can consider that they are completely complementary since they act each one on a different field of your computer fleet.
The different types of computer maintenance.
Preventive computer maintenance.
Preventive computer maintenance aims, as its name suggests, to perform preventive actions on a daily or at least very routine basis to ensure optimal operation of your company’s computer system and prevent problems from occurring before they cause damage.
The preventive maintenance is therefore composed of different measures which are mainly the updates of the operating system, the execution of programs to clean your computers and software, the installation of firewalls to ensure the maintenance of the network or a watch to look for viruses and malware that can install themselves on your equipment.
Preventive computer maintenance also aims to ensure that none of the data contained on your equipment is compromised. The service provider you have chosen to perform preventive computer maintenance on your computer system may therefore be required to make backups of important files and advise you to invest in external hard drives or database servers that will serve as a backup in case of a problem.
The preventive computer maintenance is thus carried out on defined times, which are often decided in advance on the advice of your provider according to the operating system that you use, the number of computers and printers contained in your computer park, and the nature of your activity: the personal data which can be collected on a site of on-line sale require for example reliable programs of security which do not compromise the confidence which can be carried to you by your customers
Indeed, if a security flaw leads to the leakage of this data, it is the reputation of your company that would be at stake, and therefore its durability. In this case, preventive computer maintenance works as a security that allows you to concentrate on the daily tasks of your company and to serenely develop your activity.
Corrective computer maintenance.
The preventive computer maintenance is often associated with the corrective maintenance which allows to repair a failure of material or to intervene in case of a security flaw or a virus spotted on one of the client computers of your servers.
This type of maintenance is often carried out in a punctual way by the service provider who ensures the preventive maintenance of your computer system. It is interesting to entrust this type of maintenance to the service providers who regularly intervene on your computer park because they master the ins and outs of your company, the deadlines you have to face as well as the stakes that define your daily work.
He therefore knows which data is of paramount importance, under what timeframe he should intervene so that the IT pain is not detrimental to your business, and will therefore be able to restore the system so that it is operational as quickly as possible.
The corrective computer maintenance technician therefore acts in an emergency and often benefits from a notable experience in his field that allows him to quickly diagnose the problems encountered by your computer system to set up a corrective maintenance action plan that is fast, efficient, and reliable in the long term.
The evolutionary computer maintenance
The evolutionary computer maintenance also takes place in a current way, since its goal is to make evolve your computer system so that it is always more powerful and competitive so that it ensures a comfortable quality of work to your collaborators.
This type of maintenance requires to call upon a provider who has an excellent experience in this field and a very good knowledge of the operating system on which you work daily.
Indeed, the service provider must have a perfect knowledge of the software and tools that you already use to think of solutions that would allow you to optimize them in order to work better, faster and especially more efficiently.
This type of maintenance is more common in small and medium-sized companies than preventive and corrective maintenance. Often, its interest is much less recognized since it does not aim to solve problems or prevent breakdowns already encountered before and that hinder the daily work.
However, evolutionary maintenance is being encountered more and more often. This corresponds to a change in the priorities of companies, to a better consideration of the quality of work of employees, and to the search for better productivity by focusing on comfort and investment in high-performance tools.
When the evolutionary maintenance is set up after several years of existence of a company it is often necessary to think about the installation of new equipment to replace a fleet sometimes too old, but also to update the working software which will improve the performances of the computer tools on which you work.
Evolutionary maintenance providers work in different ways: they intervene punctually to offer you a more advantageous solution than the one you already have, but which remains quite interesting and does not oblige you to make changes in an urgent way, but they can also intervene in the form of a project of rehabilitation of your computer park.
In this second case, they proceed to the research of the computer equipment that best suits the needs of your company, they proceed to the re-installation of the chosen operating system on these computers, they update the drivers and software that allow your computers to function, they establish solutions to improve the level of network and Internet connection while thinking about a plan for securing your equipment that allows you to work serenely and avoid having to resort to corrective maintenance actions too often.
Our tip for choosing the right IT maintenance package.
Computer maintenance is therefore essential to keep your business in good health and ensure that you work efficiently on your computer tools on a daily basis. The recent awareness of the importance for your employees to work on comfortable and easy to use tools leads to have recourse more frequently to evolutionary maintenance, rather than simply remaining on preventive or corrective maintenance actions.
Choosing a service provider is an important step in setting up your IT maintenance plan because you must be able to trust them to intervene when you need them.
You can therefore choose to trust a company, or a freelancer whose mission is to meet your objectives independently and whose missions are often more flexible than that of a provider in a company.