Having not been home for a couple of weeks over the holiday season, upon coming back to a cold house in early January, I realized that my thermostat was doing a poor job regulating house temperature in a smart way. When I unlocked my front door, I noticed the house was awfully cold—I recalled setting the thermostat around 64 degrees Fahrenheit, but it seemed much colder in the house than that.
Come to find out the furnace had shut off at some point while we were gone. Without warning signs that something was malfunctioning. Without someone regularly monitoring the house temperature to make me even consider having someone check for a problem during the course of the 2 weeks I was gone. Without assurance that the house was running efficiently—that we weren’t using more energy than we needed to, but that temperatures didn’t get too low to cause problems either.
What I wanted in a thermostat—a heads up test so that I could be warned when there was a problem with my furnace without having to pay for expensive and urgent service calls to get the furnace, pipes, or whatever else might result in a temperature plunge, fixed upon realizing I had a serious problem.
Comes the Nest Thermostat—Nest claims to efficiently regulate temperature in your house so that you’re only investing a lot in heating or cooling it when you or your loved ones are around. It also has a heads up test feature—periodically testing your furnace for problems proactively so that you understand when something may need fixing. It even alerts you to symptoms of common problems— upon installing the system, it alerted me to a necessary filter change—something I had overlooked from performing for over 6 months!
I can leave home for days, weeks or even months on end and still be able to understand what temperature my house is, whether there are any problems with my heating or cooling system—which gives me the assurance that in the event of a problem, I will have enough heads up to get it resolved before it becomes an expensive disaster.
Nest is a ‘smart’ thermostat, in that it learns your normal house environment, behaviors of your furnace or air conditioning systems and can figure out when something abnormal or problematic is occurring. You know before a serious problem occurs that something needs to get checked out.
That’s what Dynamic Edge does with fixed IT (and that’s why I’m a proponent of products like the Nest).
Seriously, How Does Fixed IT Relate to smart thermostats?
The short answer: Fixed IT IS an inherently smart IT platform.
What do I mean by this?
Just like the Nest understands and proactively predicts and addresses unforeseen issues with your furnace or A/C, Fixed IT is similarly monitoring your network 24/7/365 alerting IT support staff of problems that might pop up. Fixed IT monitoring includes smart (heuristic-based) screening of your entire network that identifies when irregularities and signals of pending problems.
Fixed IT, just like the Nest, provides you with a sense of real security where you don’t need to involve yourself in the day in and day out of your tech. You have confidence in your technology— knowing someone is constantly looking over, maintaining and patching your networks to avoid vulnerabilities from data breaching and hacking attempts.
But Fixed IT is more than what the Nest offers:
EVERYTHING is backed up—in the slim chance that something happened to your computer, a drive, a server, it’s simply not the end of the world. Because Fixed IT includes HOURLY Backups of machines on your network. It also includes Loaner equipment. That means you’re up and running right from where you stopped—no worry of data loss or waiting for the new hardware to come in before your work can get done.
Your technology is in line with where your business wants to go. You get a dedicated Business Technology Manager that meets quarterly with you and identifies how your existing or needed technology can be effectively leveraged for your business to meet its targets.
If something is wrong, you know that we’re working on the issue. Whether you need an onsite visit or your problem can be handled remotely, 24/7/365, emergency responses give you the confidence that problems will be addressed and not pushed to the back of the line—when you need them fixed.
Is your IT support constantly monitoring, backing up networks, patching and preventing inevitable failures from happening and keeping you on target to meet your business goals? Are you efficiently using your staff so that you’re not paying for idle hands for ‘in the event’ moments? Contact us TODAY for a FREE network health assessment.
