Built for When Things Break

When a warehouse full of PCs goes dark, or a production line is one failed desktop away from an expensive stop, the person who fixes it fastest is usually the one who already knows the system. Riaan Van Arkel is the founder and managing director of VanArkel-IT, a managed IT services business for small and medium companies in Cape Town's Northern Suburbs. He has spent almost 25 years in IT, and he runs his business on one idea: plan for the failure before it happens.

The line that couldn't stop

You've supported a manufacturing production line where downtime is very expensive. What happened?

In a previous role I looked after a production line where under an hour of downtime meant a lot of money. When the main desktop started to malfunction, I was ready. I had a backup desktop prepared to deploy, so I swapped it in, set up the important programs and updates, and the line was running again in 5 to 10 minutes.

Why keep a spare ready?

Because if something happens, a backup desktop is ready to deploy. I'd rather do the preparation before anything fails than start working out a fix while the line is standing still.

Twenty-five PCs, one failed service

Tell me about a time you got a client moving again.

A shopfitting company's network stopped handing out addresses. The DHCP service had failed, so about 25 PCs couldn't get an IP address and nothing in the warehouse was working. I fixed it and applied their pending security updates, all in 5 to 10 minutes.

What would have happened without you?

They'd have been standing around until a support company could come out, and that company wouldn't have known their system. I understood the problem and the equipment from experience, so it didn't take long.

So the speed comes from knowing the client?

Yes. Knowing the equipment and the environment is what turns a long outage into a short one, and it saved that client a lot of money.

Fixing it before they notice

What do you do that clients never see?

I monitor their network, desktops and laptops with in-house programs that VanArkel-IT built ourselves. That means we can spot an unknown issue before it creeps up on the client, plan around it, and get it resolved faster.

What kind of problems does that catch?

The everyday ones that turn into outages if nobody is watching: a machine that has gone offline, a disk that is filling up, antivirus that has been switched off.

What clients say

What do your clients say about working with you?

They're happy, and glad of the help. What they value most is that I'm proactive, and that I bring a fast amount of knowledge and know-how from nearly 25 years in IT. They've said they would recommend me to their own clients.

Who do you work with?

Small and medium businesses of every kind, from schools and law firms to warehouses and plumbers.

"I understood the problem and the equipment from experience."