Most Companies Unable to Focus on "IT" Disaster Protection: Matrix Integration Helps Businesses Move Past “Putting Out Fires” to Implement Comprehensive, Long-Term IT Strategies

​Although all companies want their IT to run smoothly, this goal continues to become more difficult for most businesses as they struggle to keep up with day-to-day IT operations, according to the expert engineers at Matrix Integration, a strategic IT infrastructure partner for more than 1,000 businesses and schools in the Midwest and beyond. The 2022 Data Protection Trends Report1 from Matrix Partner Veeam confirms that 90 percent of organizations have an “availability gap” between what business units expect from IT after a data breach, loss or breakdown, and how quickly IT can return the company to productivity.

Tim Pritchett, engineer operations manager at Matrix, is also a former CTO who has seen this situation play out often in his previous organization as well as with his current clients. “We always get calls for emergency situations, like when a system goes down and the company realizes data hasn’t been backed up for three months,” said Pritchett. “It’s like getting a call to put out a fire, when some proactive maintenance would have prevented the fire in the first place.”

Pritchett oversees a team of highly skilled engineers at Matrix Integration who are seasoned experts when it comes to assessing and evaluating a client’s needs. They understand that there’s rarely time for an IT staff of large, enterprise organizations to focus on long-term projects.

“When I was a CTO I had three categories of projects I was trying to complete – ‘now,’ ‘soon,’ and ‘someday,’” said Pritchett. “I would never get to that ‘someday’ list, and those were some of the most critical tasks, including making sure my system was efficient, hardening it against cyber threats, and ensuring data could be recovered quickly if needed. Now, as an IT solutions and managed services provider, I can help clients take on those proactive projects they never seem to have time for.”

Near Disasters and Getting Proactive about IT

To help companies get to their “someday” list, Matrix Integration developed a Proactive Services Agreement, a step-by-step approach to enhance an organization’s IT infrastructure. The first phase is an engineer evaluation and assessment, followed by an immediate fix of anything that can improve operations immediately. In the past, some of these findings (and fixes) have included:

• Discovering 17 million IP addresses at one company and reducing these down to fewer than 1,000
• Learning that half the hard drives in a client’s server farm had already failed and their support had ended six years ago
• Uncovering an email system with only six months before end of life
• Finding out that backups had stopped running weeks ago unbeknownst to the organization
• Exposing security certificates with expiration dates just around the corner

After repairing immediate problems, the next step is providing a maintenance plan that is easy to implement by internal staff members. Matrix’s engineers and account executives work with the client to prioritize key pain points and identify IT solutions that support primary business objectives. Stepping backwards from those end goals, this partnership allows for the implementation of a maintenance strategy with the organization’s best interest at the forefront. Finally, the engineers develop a plan to address worst-case scenarios such as cyberattacks, equipment failure and natural disasters, with a focus on getting businesses back up and running as quickly as possible, avoiding downtime and potentially millions of dollars. This stage is about enhancement and ultimate prevention. After an environment is stabilized with a manageable maintenance strategy in place, enhancing the IT setting with strategic recovery planning, redundant data and network solutions, and forward-looking lifecycle management becomes key to client success.

Each agreement is customized to the organization and provides as much or little support as companies need. For more information on Matrix Integration or trends in enterprise-level IT, visit matrixintegration.com.