When you hear the term "preventive maintenance," what comes to your mind? Cleaning out the gutters? Possibly exercising or dieting to stay in good health? Maybe it's getting the oil changed in your car to ensure that your engine continues to run smoothly. Regardless of the activity, "preventive maintenance" brings a negative feeling because it refers to things we don't typically want to do, but we know are necessary to remove risk and avoid bigger problems in the future. So we force ourselves to be proactive and preventive, because we know it's less costly than the consequences of ignoring the activities. If we invest our time and resources to maintain our households, our health, and our transportation...why would we neglect the technology that drives our business?

Preventive Maintenance (PM) in the IT world is simply defined as a schedule of planned activities aimed to prevent breakdowns and failure of equipment before they occur. These activities vary by company, but often include: checking file systems for errors, scanning of hard disks and files for viruses, patch management, checking levels of disk space, performance tuning, and many others. Preventive maintenance is the most overlooked and ignored aspect of PC ownership. Just like you change the oil and rotate the tires to increase the reliability of your vehicle, PM is necessary to improve your computer systems' reliability.

There are a few skeptics of preventive maintenance.  People often question why they should invest their resources into preventive maintenance, when they could just go out and purchase new equipment when something breaks. Some business leaders question the cost of PM.  And the most common justification for people not to invest in PM, is they're not sure if preventive maintenance is truly necessary for their business.

Preventive maintenance improves systems' performance and allows your equipment to maintain the speed and reliability it possessed at the date of purchase.  It also increases your productivity, and actually saves you money long-term by extending the lifecycle of your equipment. Simply put, the cost of preventive maintenance is much lower than the cost of not managing your equipment and constantly having to replace it. Preventive maintenance also protects your systems from failure, and eliminates costly downtime and recurring repair costs.

Is preventive maintenance necessary for your business? There are two easy questions to ask yourself to identify whether your business needs to invest in preventive maintenance. 1) Is your company reliant on technology to drive revenue or to communicate with clients? 2) Is the overall cost of the preventive maintenance less than the costs of downtime, lost productivity, potential lawsuits over lost or stolen data, and loss of goodwill with potential and existing clients to your business? If you can say yes to either of the two previous questions, preventive maintenance is a must for your business.

Just like in every other facet of life, if you want to avoid bigger problems and expenses down the road, you must be proactive and do some preventive maintenance. To learn more about how a little PM can save you a lot of time and money, please contact Guidant Partners at 615-327-9111 or via the web at www.guidantpartners.com.