5 Tips To Effectively Manage Your IT Infrastructure

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October 10, 2022 Business

A fully functioning IT infrastructure is essential for smooth business operations. This is especially true as the current business environment heavily relies on technology for operational efficiency. Therefore, managing your IT infrastructure should be one of your top priorities.

Managed IT service providers (MSPs) can give you support for your business’s IT needs. However, there may be internal IT resources they might not have control over. This can mean they can only provide suggestions, recommendations, and advice on what you should do, but the actual implementation of these inputs falls on you.

You can take several ways to ensure your IT infrastructure is protected and functioning properly. The below tips can significantly help you achieve this.

1. Assess Your Current IT infrastructure

Your current IT resources can help determine the direction of your future IT policies. Essentially, you’d want to formulate policies that would be effective in your existing IT environment. Therefore, critically looking at your current IT resources would be a good starting point.

You can check with your MSP about your IT system’s protection status and if there are changes to consider. As seen at https://www.bacsit.com a reliable IT support company would often offer an IT assessment to help you identify potential risks, areas for improvement, and opportunities for cost reduction. You can also seek views and suggestions from your team members. Such data can act as your checklist for your IT processes and policies.

Additionally, comparing your IT network with the market trend can also give you a clear picture of where your IT infrastructure stands. Once you gather this information exhaustively, you can use it to determine your business needs.

For instance, you can ascertain if there are IT resources in your network that might not be necessary to your operations. Assessing your current IT infrastructure can also help establish resource gaps you may need to fill. Thus, an indebt analysis can help determine what IT resources you need or don’t need for efficient business operations.

2. Carry Out A Regular IT Risk Assessment Exercise

Your IT infrastructure is vulnerable to both internal and external risk factors. The internal risks are primarily from your staff, and external ones are due to your IT network’s exposure to internet traffic. Therefore, it’s vital to identify and evaluate these risks and threats to your IT resources. The assessment includes areas like your network’s vulnerability to various cyber threats.

Depending on your operations and threat exposure, you can carry out the risk assessment exercise annually or bi-annually. However, IT experts recommend using an external assessor to carry out this exercise. For instance, you can use your local MSP if an internal IT team handles all your IT operations.

A typical risk assessment exercise can either follow a quantitative or qualitative methodology, but cybersecurity experts recommend combining the two to understand your business’s threat level clearly.

Quantitative risk assessment considers the frequency of risk occurrence over a particular period. It also ascertains the monetary costs of the associated risk. For instance, say your risk assessment exercise is annual. The quantitative approach can show your single and yearly loss expectancy. In addition, it can show an incident’s annual rate of occurrence.

Single loss expectancy is your monetary loss if the incident occurs once. In comparison, yearly loss expectancy will display the total cost if the incident occurs over one year, depending on the frequency of its occurrence. On the other hand, the qualitative approach evaluates your business’s threat level from low to high.

Even though it can be complex, a risk assessment exercise can help evaluate your present IT protocols and determine the appropriate risk mitigation controls. You can also appropriately prioritize high-risk and high-value IT resources. Furthermore, regular assessments can help you establish and maintain compliance with industry regulations.

3. Create Clear IT Goals, Implement, And Continuously Monitor Them

By default, IT infrastructure and risk assessment should help you formulate informed IT goals for your business. These goals should be the standard operating procedures (SOPs) every staff member should follow. Additionally, your goals should also encompass the whole IT infrastructure. This means you shouldn’t only factor in its hardware and software aspects. You should also consider data protection and privacy.

Although, it’d be worth noting that policy formulation alone doesn’t automatically result in successful IT infrastructure management since its implementation is equally important. Without efficient implementation, your business’s IT resources could still be at risk.

Once you have operational SOPs in place, continuous monitoring is recommended to ensure there are no violations by all parties and to determine if changes are necessary.

4. Train Your Team

You can roll out new and better IT policies and protocols every year. However, they may not be as effective if your team doesn’t understand their significance. Cybersecurity experts regard staff as your first line of defense against cyber threats. Therefore, training them on cybersecurity measures they should observe would be best.

There may be cases wherein they may encounter cyber threats such as phishing emails. Even if you have anti-malware software in your system, it can still be vulnerable if your team isn’t aware of how to recognize these threats.

You can organize regular training and updates with your internal IT team. It would also help if you got an external trainer. This can be a representative of your local MSP or a certified IT expert. Such training can help reduce your network’s vulnerabilities, which can help lower downtime risks due to cyber-attacks or device crashes.

5. Create Robust Data Backup Policies

The value of your IT infrastructure is in the data it carries. That’s why IT experts recommend security frameworks to help you protect your IT network. However, your business can still suffer significant losses if data gets lost or destroyed. The loss can be from a cyber-attack or other internal issues. A robust data backup policy is essential in this case.

Backing up your data can help restore your network to a previous point and reduce data loss from an incident. The growth of cloud computing means you can safely back up your data and other digital files in the cloud. On the other hand, you could also have an offsite data backup.

In addition, your backup policies should also cover the frequency and responsibility of the data backup process. And depending on your business operations, you can back up your data daily or weekly. This can be done by your internal IT team, your MSP, or both. However, there should be a record and report confirming the process is completed successfully every time.

Conclusion

An excellent IT infrastructure is crucial for your business’s growth and success. Hence, as a business owner, prioritizing it is essential. These tips can be a good start to help you effectively manage your IT infrastructure and improve the efficiency of your business operations.