Server Support Managed IT

COVID-19 has added additional areas of which a company could be compromised. With more employees working from home than ever, we are seeing security faults in home environments which open the entire company vulnerable to attack. It is imperative that your WFH employees are connecting to your network through protected wi-fi, that requires a password to gain access. In addition, they should be connecting through a VPN connection or to cloud services using MFA. Our technical support team has worked with our clients to implement these network security practices to better protect their data and network infrastructure.

Dedicated Servers are servers that are not shared with other businesses. A dedicated server can also be focused on just one thing, like file sharing or maybe it is solely acting as a domain controller.  These can be physical or virtual servers located at your company location or possibly at a data center. The physical server can act as the server or act as a host, providing virtualization of the server(s).  Server virtualization is becoming more common as a server solution due to its ability to address numerous business needs. Virtualization makes disaster recovery restores quicker and more efficient, which adds to business productivity. Our server support team have an extensive knowledgebase when it comes to setting up physical servers as well as virtual ones.

Cloud-Based or web servers are becoming more common as technology continues to advance. Some web server providers are Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. Web servers give users the ability to easily connect from anywhere they can get an internet connection. Again, this should be limited to private wi-fi connections that require access via password. With our server support services, we provide the management and troubleshooting of these cloud-based environments.

Ensure you always have a windows server on a supported operating system. When a windows server ages out of support, it will no longer get patched or updated, leaving it vulnerable to malicious attacks such as malware. Our server support team handles this and other server management for all of our server support contract clients.

One of the biggest benefits of having a server support contract in place with Kansas City Managed IT, is that we will not only take care maintaining and managing your servers, but also troubleshoot any issues that may pop up.

Common Reasons for Server Failures

Hard Drive Failure- A hard drive failure can lead to a degraded raid status, causing numerous problems for the server and the network infrastructure. Kansas City Managed IT’s technical support team makes sure there are redundant hard drives in our clients servers, so in the case of failure, there is still one or more to allow the server to continue to function until there is a replacement.

Bad Windows Server Update- Unfortunately, not all Windows server updates function properly. When a bad Windows server update it performed, it can “break” the server on occasion. Our server management services have us perform those updates for you, but we ensure that they are done after the updates have been tested to prevent a bad patch or upgrade from effecting business needs and productivity as well as protecting data.

Low memory- Low memory on a server can cause slowness, program errors or applications not running correctly. By having our server support services, we can setup low memory alerts, allowing us to address this before major issues occur.

Old Operating system- When a server, specifically a Windows Server, has an old operating system, not only is it no longer supported by Microsoft, but it will also stop working with more recent software, causing numerous issues for the IT infrastructure. Out IT support team keep our clients’ operating systems up-to-date, so their windows servers will work more effectively.

Server support will be covered under a support contract with Kansas City Managed IT. This will include the services listed above like patching, running updates and other maintenance tasks as well as providing technical support when there are issues with your server. Don’t leave your server security up to chance. Call us and we will evaluate your environment and give recommendations for a managed services contract.

Server support consists of the following:

• Fix issues related to the operating system or applications running on the server. This includes applications like exchange server or sql server and troubleshooting problems like outdated drivers causing system crashes.
• Add and remove users from active directory as needed.
• Create file shares and assign the proper security permissions for user access to them.
• Setup and share network accessible printers from the server for easier administration.
• Setup and manage security groups and distribution groups as needed.
• Performing system maintenance like disk defragmentation and disk cleanup can help your system perform better and we will schedule these processes to run on a consistent basis.
• Manage and apply updates to servers to ensure critical and security patches are being applied on a regular basis. We will setup a routine schedule for these updates and monitor the systems to make sure they are receiving the updates as expected.
• Monitor and maintain server antivirus software to make sure it is receiving new definitions as often as possible and running in a healthy state.
• Monitor servers for unusual resource usage and troubleshoot the cause.
  Make recommendations when to upgrade or replace servers based on server performance and other key metrix.
  Support your servers in the most effective way possible.