As All Business, a popular website devoted to improving small businesses, writes, making the decision to bring your information technology needs in-house can have a number of advantages for your business. From giving you access to your technology so that you can upgrade it at a moment’s notice to ripping away all of the limitations that come with outsourcing, building an onsite server room can be both exciting and highly beneficial.
However, none of this should be read to mean that doing so doesn’t also bring challenges to your company. You may have thought choosing the right server rack enclosures, deciding between new and used server racks, and choosing the right operating system was trying enough, but as any IT professional can tell you, setting up your server room is only a tiny part of successfully running IT in-house.
Three of the Biggest Threats to Your Company’s in-House IT
- Server Room Fires
- Hackers
- Component Failure
According to the National Fire Protection Association, fires cost Americans more than $12 billion per year, taking 16,500 lives in the process. An increasing cause of fires in the business setting is improperly installed and mismanaged server rooms. Doing a quick Google search for “server room fires” will net you a number of recent stories about fires that have completely gutted businesses.
What can you do to avoid a server room fire? Choose your server rack enclosures carefully. Each server rack enclosure has both a weight and a power rating. If the power requirements for your servers are higher than what your server rack enclosures can produce, you risk short circuiting your systems, and you also risk an electrical fire.
As The Wall Street Journal points out, cyberhacking costs the United States approximately $100 billion a year. Sometimes cybercriminals want to steal credit card data and go on a shopping spree, and other times they want to break into a companies’ servers to steal data just for kicks. Either way, it’s bad for business. Directing your IT professionals to regularly check for trojans on your systems and ensuring they use smart security protocols, from state-of-the-art firewalls to complex passwords, can help you avoid becoming a victim.
Unlike the other dangers on this list, there isn’t much you can do to avoid component failure; however, there are ways you can mitigate the impact. Setting up redundancies so that your systems switch to a backed up version of your servers can keep you from long periods of downtime while you replace the faulty equipment.
Do you work as an IT professional? What other challenges or dangers do you have to contend with to keep your servers operating? Let us know in the comments below! Continue reading here: www.global1resources.com