Cold and flu season has a predictable annual timeline. When the weather starts to cool down, you’re reminded to wash your hands and take extra precautions to avoid catching a cold. When everyone around you has the sniffles, staying healthy can feel like a challenge.
Unfortunately, in the technology world, there’s no typical computer virus season. Computer viruses can infect your hardware or network during any season, at any time. Having a strong cybersecurity solution in place is your best defense. However, by implementing hardware best practices, you can help assure your equipment stays healthy. Like simply remembering to wash your hands, many hardware best practices are easy to understand and inexpensive to implement in your business.
What Hardware Should We Include?
Hardware consists of the physical components that constitute your entire technology infrastructure. Generally, these devices include PCs, monitors, keyboards, phone handsets, storage devices, and servers. Examples of more advanced individual hardware components include hard drives (HDD), solid-state drives (SDD), video cards, and random access memory (RAM).
Getting Started With Your Hardware Health
Oftentimes, the most difficult part of building best practices is knowing where to start. With hardware, you first need to figure out what you own and how to properly provide maintenance services.
Start with a hardware audit
In order to institute healthy hardware best practices, you need investigate and document the devices in your technology infrastructure. By investigating the existing hardware on your network, you can determine which pieces are outdated and need to be repaired or replaced.
Likewise, you can also discover devices that you’re not actively monitoring. When it comes to cyberattacks and network inefficiencies, one rogue hardware component can be the single point of failure for your entire network. In addition, while conducting your hardware audit, it’s a great time to share cybersecurity tips with employees.
Verify security updates
You hardware can only be as safe as the software that’s installed on it. While it’s challenging to calculate when a cyberattack is going to happen, there tends to be an increase when software companies release new security updates. Security updates are usually the result of recently uncovered vulnerabilities. If you’re not regularly updating your software, you could be leaving the door to your network wide open for hackers.
Clean Hardware Is Healthy Hardware
When you’re using the same hardware every day, you might not notice the dust and debris building up around the fans, vents, and ports. Dirty components have to work harder to complete processes. Over time, this can cause components to wear out faster than normal. Support the extended life of your hardware by keeping it clean.
Blow away dust and debris
Technology hardware is expensive. In comparison a can of compressed air is relatively inexpensive. Dust and debris can bog down your equipment, making it work harder than it should. If your hardware sounds loud, or if you notice it’s always running at its highest capacity, it’s eventually going to wear out. One of the quickest and cheapest ways to keep your hardware healthy is by cleaning away built up dust and debris using a can of compressed air duster.
First, inspect and gently use the canned air duster to clean your hardware’s vents and fans. For hardware like a keyboard or a mouse, use the air to dislodge any debris trapped under keys or buttons. In addition, you can use the canned air to gently clean out ports and speakers. Removing excess build up and allowing your hardware to operate efficiently can help extend the life of your hardware.
Healthy Hardware, From the Inside Out
With hardware, what’s under the cover matters. Part of keeping your hardware healthy is keeping it clean, inside and out. Keeping your hardware’s files and applications in good working order benefits your hardware and your overall business in the end.
Back up your old files
If you’re hanging onto old files for a just-in-case scenario, consider moving them to a local on-site backup or to an off-site cloud backup service. With data backup and recovery services, you can create a regularly occurring file backup that helps keep your old files secure and frees up additional storage space on your local machines. Most importantly, when you employ data backup services, your business’s important data is protected when a disaster strikes.
Remove old programs and applications
With an endless library of productivity boosting applications on the market, your computer can quickly become bloated and over encumbered. Having a ton of antiquated software can make you entire system work harder than it needs to. Do you have old software applications sitting on your computer you don’t use anymore? Consider removing them from your system.
Oftentimes, there are applications that run in the background that steal your system’s resources. Even unattended, programs can steal resources if they’re running without your knowledge. Alternatively, they can require extra resources at startup and shut down to apply updates. In addition, there’s always the potential for an application to get hacked. The less doors you have to your system, the less likely it is for a hacker to sneak their way in.
Do You Need Help With Your Hardware Health?
At High Touch, we bring the human touch to technology. We can help examine your company’s hardware needs and provide support and knowledge to make sure you’re getting the most out of your hardware. In addition, High Touch can provide Data Backup and Help Desk services to help meet your business’s hardware goals. Contact us today to learn more.