Approaches
Preventive Maintenance
Scheduled work that heads off predictable failures, such as expired certificates, unpatched servers and backups that do not restore. It usually costs far less than the incidents it prevents.
Part of Maintenance & Modernization
Preventive maintenance is planned work that deals with problems before they cause incidents. It includes applying patches, renewing certificates, upgrading dependencies, watching data growth and checking that backups can be restored.
Why it gets skipped
Its results are hard to see. A month in which nothing broke looks the same whether or not the preventive work was done, so it is an easy budget line to cut. The cost shows up later, for example when an expired certificate takes a service offline on a public holiday.
What it covers
- Security patches applied within an agreed window.
- Certificate and domain renewals tracked against their expiry dates.
- Dependency and runtime upgrades in small, regular steps. A runtime three major versions behind turns an upgrade into a project.
- Storage, database and index growth checked against their limits.
- Regular test restores from backup, so the team knows the restore works and how long it takes.
How to think about the cost
Preventive maintenance is a small, scheduled cost set against occasional large, unplanned ones, which usually affect customers as well. We include a preventive schedule in our support contracts so the work is planned and visible to the client.