IT support is more than added value. It is a core service.
Businesses need to be sure their IT support can cover them, day or night.
With businesses in the UAE spending an average of 47.9 hours dealing with the aftermath of cyber-crime attacks, having your company’s systems go down without fast IT support can seriously impact revenues.
Other, less obvious, but just as serious problems with downtime occurring includes company morale plunging, as employees get frustrated when they are unable to do their job properly, while company reputations can be quickly shattered thanks to outages occurring.
Confidence
And with digital economies working 24 hours a day, the truth is there simply is no ‘good’ time for an outage to occur. Which is why businesses today must have confidence in the stability of their systems all day, every day.
Big losses for some bosses
IT outages are nothing new, but the last 12 months has seen its fair share of high-profile IT problems, including:
Visa credit card systems
Visa customers were left frustrated after an outage in January rendered their cards unusable for hours, with some transactions being pre-authorised more than once after the original payment failed to go through.
TSB data handling issues
Customers of UK bank TSB reported they had been locked out of their accounts in July for the second time this year as the bank struggled with an IT outage only two months after a botched IT systems upgrade left some customers unable to access their accounts for a week in January.
The UK NHS hit by ransomware
A Freedom of Information request revealed the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) suffered 1,300 hours’ worth of IT downtime in the last three years, with the public service having famously fallen foul of a sophisticated ransomware attack last year.
In order to minimise the impact of IT downtime affecting your business, Penta has a multi-tier approach to solving clients’ IT issues, providing the appropriate level of service to match the severity of the issue, with 24-hour service also available for the most serious issues.
IT support
Typical IT support requests are assigned assigned to one of two teams, dealing with each issue in a manner suited to the technical severity of the problem at hand.
Serious
However, serious problems can be escalated to Penta’s skilled infrastructure team, which have a number of contact options to ensure reporting issues is as painless as possible, as Shadi Jaber, IT Service Desk Manager at Penta, explains:
“Clients can drop requests by phone or email. However, for new service provision or for access related requests, for instance the creation of new users or granting access to certain folders, an email needs to be sent or approved by the client’s security contact for compliance purposes.”
“Support is offered from 8am until 6pm from Monday through to Friday. For critical issues affecting VIPs or the client system, there is an out-of-business hours support system where the user will drop a voice message and an engineer will get back to them within an hour.”
IT outages a costly affair
UAE business hit by cyber crime
Impact of cyber crime unveiled
Khaleej Times
British bank takes online battering
TSB customers’ outrage after bank services go down again
The Telegraph
Protect yourself
Anti-virus software is a necessity
Penta Blog