It’s basically guaranteed that your business’ IT has increased in complexity as time has passed, not only giving you more capabilities and opportunities but also creating some challenges in terms of managing it all. When this is paired with nowadays’ more advanced threats, your business could be at significant risk. Let’s talk about how you can manage the complexity of your IT more effectively to prevent this outcome.
Reducing Your IT’s Complexity in 5 Simple Steps
Step One: Make a Plan
From the start, you need to create a strategy that complements every part of your infrastructure. To accomplish this, you must map out your entire infrastructure… from your servers to your applications and everything in between. This will allow you to determine how everything interacts and spot vulnerabilities before they escalate. As an added bonus, this plan can help simplify troubleshooting when necessary.
Step Two: Automate Aggressively
When dealing with a complex IT infrastructure, the less hands-on management is needed, the better. This makes automation your best friend. Automating processes like updates, backups, and patches eliminates the chance of human error and gives your team more time to focus on other priorities.
It also needs to be said that automation helps ensure consistency, which boosts the reliability of larger infrastructures.
Step Three: Maintain Before You Have To
You also need to keep an eye on your IT through monitoring and proactive maintenance to ensure its continued operability. A monitoring system allows you to set alerts for various issues—such as when you are approaching storage capacity or unusual traffic detected on your network—enabling your IT team to resolve them before they disrupt the workday through downtime. Auditing your systems also helps identify issues in your hardware and software so they can be resolved, helping preserve your equipment for longer.
Step Four: Prioritize Security
We’d also be remiss if we didn’t address how critical security is to your business’ technology infrastructure. Malware and breaches increase in likelihood the more complex your IT becomes, and that’s before we even mention insider threats.
This makes it imperative that you have reliable cybersecurity protections in place, deploying multi-factor authentication to secure all accounts, encryption to ensure data privacy, and network segmentation to minimize the damage a breach could cause. This all needs to be verified through routine security audits and vulnerability assessments, and your whole team needs to be trained on cybersecurity best practices to minimize the likelihood of one of them being bamboozled.
Step Five: Collaborate and Communicate
Finally, the departments and teams that make up your business need to talk to one another. Different elements and processes are often managed separately, so there will likely be some confusion without clear lines of communication to share any changes, issues, and/or updates. Fortunately, IT service management (ITSM) platforms simplify this communication by tracking requests and incidents and keeping everyone up to speed on applicable changes so the team can be flexible throughout future challenges.
This can be a lot, but you don’t need to handle it alone.
Reach out to Compudata to learn more about our proactive IT services and how they can make managing your business technology easier and more rewarding. Call us today at 1-855-405-8889.