I’m always looking for examples of why a managed service plan, like our Elite Care, is a no-brainer for small companies (you can read all about Elite Care here). Just the other day our Command Center, the proactive monitoring system we use, sent an alert stating that one of our client’s hard drives had a bad block. For those of you non-technical types, a bad block is a big red flag telling you the hard drive is going to fail. Now the client this happened to was an engineering firm and the computer was their main CAD workstation.

It’s nice that Microsoft’s Event Log viewer captures these alerts, but not many people review their computer’s event logs (none that I know anyway), most users don’t know where to find the event log and most IT techs only look at them when there’s a problem. Well if the hard drive fails, it’s too late.

So after we received the alert, we ordered a new drive and replaced it when no one was using the machine. No downtime for the customer. Had we not received the alert and had our client not had the foresight to use our managed service plan; the hard drive would have failed, at least a day or two of down-time would’ve occurred and any data stored on the local hard drive would’ve been lost.

Our Command Center notifies us of failing hardware, poor performing computers, unauthorized security attempts and much more. It really brings big business technology to the small business.

We will have our blog back up and running shortly.