Spring Cleaning Your Business’ Technology

Technology is a big part of doing business for a lot of organizations. One issue that comes into play is that managing that technology can get a little much for a small organization or one that doesn’t actively have some type of plan of how to organize their IT in a way that can keep that technology from being a risk or a problem. This month, we’ll take a look at a couple things that can be done to clean up your IT and make it be more of a benefit to your organization.

Choosing the Right Technology

The first thing that you need to do if you want your technology to fuel efficient business is choose the right technology for your organizational needs. Not that long ago this used to be very straightforward. You would buy servers, workstations, networking equipment, software licenses, and security tools and implement them in-house and hire an IT administrator to oversee and maintain everything. Well, today there are a lot more options available to consider. Here are a few of the new options that businesses should take into consideration.

Cloud Computing

One of the largest growth markets in technology is cloud computing. While many organizations have been using cloud-based communications such as email and VoIP for several years, there are now reliable and secure options for data hosting, processing, and software that can work to shift an organization’s IT expenses. While the tried and true strategy of hosting your own technology is still popular among businesses, more organizations are utilizing applications that are hosted by third-party providers. This Software-as-a-Service method gives organizations the ability to easily scale their application licenses and storage while also shifting their financial requirements from a massive upfront capital expense to a more flexible and budgetable operational expense. 

Remote Security 

A lot of organizations are depending on remote teams for their productivity. Obviously, there is a debate around whether remote productivity stacks up to that of in-house workers, but regardless where your business decides to do business from, you need to prioritize security. Today’s hackers have much more sophisticated malware than ever before and the fact is that it only takes one wrong decision to create major problems for your business. One tool that you need if you are going to rely on remote workers is an enterprise virtual private network (VPN) tool. It can provide the secure data transmission needed to allow remote workers to interact with your business’ crucial onsite IT and do so without the risk of data being intercepted in transit. 

Policies and Procedures

Many times, having antiquated policies that govern the way your staff interacts and uses your business’ technology are to blame for the problems you have with your staff-IT interactions. That’s why it is so important to have updated policies and procedures that govern the way your staff uses the technology your business relies on. Here are some tips to properly ensure your policies and procedures are effectively deployed:

• Be practical - No person likes to have too many rules they need to operate under. The tendency when building out IT policy is to make things complicated to ensure that it thoroughly addresses the potential security issues. Remember, simple is more effective than complicated and brevity doesn’t mean that your policies lack thoroughness. You will also want to write it in a way that even the least technically savvy person in your organization can easily understand the directives.
• Set review expectations - One problem a lot of organizations have with their IT policies is that they leave the review of policies optional. If people aren’t obligated to read something, they typically won’t. You need to set some type of review expectations to ensure that your staff reads and understands the policies that you’ve set in place.
• Have a flexible update process - While you probably don’t want to continuously change policies that are designed to govern the way that your staff operates, having a review and amendment schedule that helps update policies to effectively meet the issues and demands of the organization is important. 

Any organization can get more efficient in their processes through the use of technology, but if they don’t do the right things when implementing it, they can actually cause more inefficiency. If you would like to have a conversation about how to best deploy technology that will help your organization do what you do better, give us a call today at 301-571-5040.