Did you used to play Sim City back in the day? You’d spend a couple of hours setting up the perfect town : the traffic would flow smoothly, everybody was well housed and happy, and the taxes were rolling in. Then your mum would call you down for your tea. Half an hour later you would get back and half your city was on fire, there were traffic jams everywhere and the people were protesting outside City Hall.
That’s your IT infrastructure, that is.
In times of a business slow down we sometimes get calls from customers along the lines of “You’re doing a great job, everything is working well and all the staff are at peak efficiency. We are cutting costs though, so don’t look after us any more, we’ll call you if anything goes wrong”.
I have to explain that things are running smoothly BECAUSE we are looking after them. The little tweaks, updates, patches and nudges we do to the systems are necessary to keep things on track. With so many interconnected services, systems and operations in the typical company infrastructure you can’t just set it and forget it. Things need monitoring and maintaining. If you stop the maintenance then it might be OK tomorrow, but pretty soon things start to fall apart.
And a malware attack on an unpatched IT system can stomp on everything like Godzilla on your simulated city.
Don’t skimp on your IT support!
