How to Increase IT Infrastructure Reliability with Remote Hands

In the last year, the general cost of data center downtime is estimated to have cost organizations “$5,600 to $9,000 per minute or more than $100,000 per hour.” Not only is downtime costly to your bottom line, but it also presents many other implications, such as lost data and information, a decrease in customer confidence, increased cybersecurity risks and more. While there are procedures and processes that can help mitigate risks, unplanned downtime is not completely avoidable. In fact, the Uptime Institute reports that 31% of critical facilities experienced an unplanned outage within the last two years. 

With the implementation of expert IT remote hands services, you gain instant access to a certified data center IT team dedicated to ensuring the operational success of your critical infrastructure day and night. Serving as the eyes and ears of your facility, a remote hands team gives you peace of mind about the reliability and longevity of your IT infrastructure. Not only does this improve the reliability of your operations, but by implementing a dedicated support team, your regular IT staff will be able to focus on business-driving tactics without the threat of system errors or potential downtime. 

How Remote Hands Can Increase Infrastructure Reliability

Preventative Maintenance

To best support your facility’s devices and servers, your equipment must be well maintained. When it comes to IT equipment (ITE), having eyes on-site is increasingly important for regular and preventative maintenance. As system errors and malfunctions occur, these issues can lead to a snowball effect of breakdowns that, if not solved in a timely manner, cause IT outages and downtime. When you dedicate a team to focus on daily maintenance, you give them the ability to spot and remedy potential concerns before they become a problem. For larger facilities with a multitude of system configurations, HPC, mainframe, hyperconverged infrastructure,s and more, manual maintenance from an unequipped IT team can lead to a larger threat of human error. By outsourcing your remote hands services to a certified third party, you’re able to mitigate the risks of defective equipment performance and infrastructure downtime.

Troubleshooting

Unfortunately, system failures don’t abide by regular 9 to 5 office hours. When you rely on internal IT support, you either have to staff 24×7 or dispatch someone for off-the-clock support when things go south. In contrast, a dedicated outsourced facility management and remote hands team is able to troubleshoot and identify issues and failures the moment they occur. Not only does this provide support for your overall IT performance, but it also gives your internal team space and time to improve operations and services without the overarching responsibility of maintaining equipment performance. As a result, your remote hands team reduces time to resolution involving hardware, troubleshooting issues with network connectivity, hard-drive and power supply replacement, system and platform updates and more. A dedicated remote hands team is more than a simple support team—they become an expert extension of your existing IT staff.

Cybersecurity

As remote work and online activities steadily increase, cybersecurity and network connectivity have become increasingly important risk factors for data centers to consider. Having an operational team certified per today’s security standards allows you to have the most up-to-date regulatory frameworks specific to your industry in place. As our world becomes more interconnected, your facility will benefit by working with a known and vetted facility management and remote hands team that supports and understands the complexities of physical and cybersecurity. 

With a team of over 400 critical facility technicians supporting more than 55 data centers, T5 is proud to provide management and remote hands services to some of the world’s leading enterprise and hyperscale cloud customers. With our industry-leading collaborative process and expertise, our team is ready to support your mission-critical environment.