How smart schools and colleges ensure server uptime

Central to all educational network activity, the server is the single most important component of the IT infrastructure. As such that makes it potentially the biggest single point of network failure. The good news is that modern servers are increasingly robust and rarely fail. The bad news is that when they do, the cost and time implications can be horrendous. Worse news still, is the fact it is extremely difficult for even the most experienced school IT team to see failure coming.

In an ideal world you would need to carry out a check on your server every 15 minutes or so 24/7/365 to look for warning signals. If you could be subject to hackers or virus attacks you’d want to check those too. Most of all you need to look for the early warning signs and head off disaster before it strikes.

That is why more and more schools and colleges are outsourcing their educational server monitoring to ramsac by using our dedicated ServerGuard provision, in effect, meaning they need never worry about server problems again.

ServerGuard utilises a secure link between mission critical IT network functions and our own ServerGuard tools which are hosted on a dedicated server at ramsac’s head office. This initiates a complete system scan of your servers every 15 minutes to check, among other things, the following criteria:

• Antivirus status
• Back-up status
• Website availability
• External attacks by hackers
• Disk space usage
• Critical event occurrence

Monitoring the system in this way means we can be alerted to exceptional circumstances and potential issues well before things go wrong. In practice, this means an alert is displayed to our remote help-desk team as soon as something untoward happens, which in turn lets us investigate, detect and repair things even before they have come to your notice.