With the year coming to a close, now is the perfect time to plan for the future. Most businesses begin the year with the hope of growing and improving operations and much of how a business operates depends on technology. Thus it makes sense to look to your IT for areas of improvement.
A technology review provides an opportunity to look at several areas of your IT and prepare for the new year. The goal is to take time to focus on improvements you can make to boost your bottom line and to what to do to reduce the risk of a costly cyberattack.
A recent study by Deloitte looked at digitally advanced small businesses, and here are some of the ways they excel of other businesses:
- They experience year-over-year revenue growth nearly 4x as high.
- Their employees earn 2x more revenue.
- Have an average employee growth rate over 6x higher.
The bottom line is that companies that use technology well, do better in their own business and are also more secure. According to an IBM survey, businesses that have an incident response plan reduce the costs of a data breach by 61%. So now is a great time to do a technology review with your IT team or managed IT provider. This will set you up for success and security in the new year.
Considerations When Reviewing Your Technology at Year-End
The main goal of a technology review is to look at all areas of your IT infrastructure for improvements. Security, efficiency, and bottom-line considerations will be the key drivers for any future initiatives.
Here are some items to look at and consider:
Perform an IT inventory
Before you start any review you need to know your current assets and where they are in their lifecycle. The end of the year is is a good time to identify current hardware and software in need of upgrade or replacement and then, you can plan and avoid unplanned downtime.
Pain Points
You do not want to make any changes before considering any pain points employees may have, otherwise you might miss some great opportunities to improve staff productivity and wellbeing. Some ideas are to talk to your employees about:
-
- how they use technology.
- what struggles they face.
- how they feel technology could improve to make their jobs better.
- if they have any suggestions on other possible tech solutions.
- their favourite and least favourite programs and apps they use at work and at home and why.
This, can help you target the most impactful improvements.
Technology Policies
When technology policies get outdated, people stop following them. You need to regularly review all your policies to see if any of them need of updating to reflect new circumstances and conditions. For example, if you now have some staff working from home, make sure your device usage policy reflects this. When you update policies, let your staff employees know so that they can keep up to date on important information and brush up on things they may have forgotten.
Security
You should regularly review your systems to see if there are any indications of breaches or cyberattacks. Also, examine and revise your security settings (including security software, firewall settings, MFA settings for online accounts etc) to make sure they are as current as can be. Also don’t just focus on your physical assets as any cloud services you use are also a target for attack.
It’s also useful to have IT professional perform a security audit and / or vulnerability scan to identify any weaknesses before it is too late.
Disaster Recovery Planning
Do you have a disaster recovery plan? Is there a list of steps for employees to follow in the case of a natural disaster or cyberattack? Take the time to look at disaster recovery planning for the new year. You should also put dates in place for preparedness drills and training in the coming months.
Admin Access & Old Accounts
This is a great time to perform an audit of old and privileged accounts as part of your year-end review. Over time, staff come and go and permissions can be misappropriated which leaves holes in your network and your network at a higher risk of attack.
The fewer privileged accounts you have in your business, the lower your security risk. Thus you should ensure that only users that need them have administrative permissions.
While looking through your accounts, also check for orphaned accounts from staff that have left or have been reassigned. Leaving them active poses a security risk and you need to close these ASAP.
IT Plans
As you know by know if you make any plans “on the fly”, they usually come back to bite you. It is best to plan out an IT strategy, so you can upgrade in an organized way. Some of the plans around IT you should have include:
-
- hardware upgrades
- security
- disaster recovery
- cloud computing
- staff computer usage
Having a plan allows you to budget for your future needs more easily and avoid unplanned expenses.
Cloud Use
Review your use of cloud applications. Are they still in use? Are there any other services that will benefit your business? A review can help you cut waste and save money while also exploring other options to benefit you business.
Shadow IT
Shadow IT is the use of software and cloud services that haven’t been approved by management. Remove this security risk by either closing the accounts or officially approving them. Also setup proper management or admin accounts for these products so if an employee leave access is not blocked.
Customer-Facing Services
Don’t forget to check the customer experience of your technology infrastructure. Go through your website and contact process as a customer would. If you get frustrated by things like site navigation, then your customers may be too. If needed, include improvements to your customer-facing technology in your new year plans.