When it comes to your IT, just like for your health, the break-fix approach is dead wrong. In IT, waiting for and simply reacting to breaks can mean hours of downtime for your business, lost data, lost revenue, and permanent damage to your reputation. That’s why proactive IT leaders keep a close watch for symptoms of issues before something happens – and the most effective IT operations have practices to continuously monitor, audit, stress test, and reevaluate their IT environment. Unfortunately this effective approach is not upheld by most organizations, especially SMB’s who have limited resources to dedicate to their IT.
To help you understand why an IT Environment Assessment is important and the value your organization would get from having one, here are our top 5 reasons why you should consider having an IT Environment Assessment:
1. Your IT team is bogged down
If you have a small IT team, they will probably be the first to tell you that they wear many hats. While they’re working hard to keep your business up and running, the complexity of IT and the number of things IT departments need to stay on top of is continuously expanding. With an IT Environment Assessment, benefit from an outside perspective that brings (1) dedicated focus on IT optimization and (2) specialized experience solving for many other businesses the same challenges you face.
2. Best practices change over time
IT changes rapidly – and with it, so do IT best practices. While the term “best practices” can sound aspirational, in IT, living by them is critical. Following best practices in IT isn’t about being an early adopter of the latest and greatest, it’s about keeping your infrastructure operating reliably, blocking newly emerging threats, and keeping your business running. An IT Environment Assessment is focused on getting your environment caught up so it can keep up with your business. Even if you did an IT environment review within the past year, with the pace of change resulting from the pandemic, you may have fallen far behind already.
3. Issues compound over time
If you’ve ever had an injury that you didn’t give enough time to to heal, you’re already familiar with how a small issue can turn into a big one. The inner workings of an IT environment are a massive and complex interdependent ecosystem that is important to keep healthy. When issues in your IT environment aren’t resolved, they usually cascade and cause new issues elsewhere – and this can happen incredibly quickly. Sometimes something that isn’t even an issue becomes one when it’s left unaddressed over time (for example, opening ports for external access and forgetting to close them). Having an IT Environment Assessment will help you maintain your environment. It will discover and address issues before they compound further and cause expenses for repairs and lost employee productivity that could have been avoided.
4. Some IT issues have no warning signs
Businesses invest in and rely on intelligent tools to alert them when there’s an IT issue – but tools can’t cover all IT functions, nor all of the most important ones. For example, consider domain management. An issue in your domain has the potential to lock every user out of your systems and take many hours to resolve. Concerningly, domain issues are generally asymptomatic, giving no signals that there could be a disruptive problem. Able One’s IT Environment Assessment is performed by professionals who use their experience and intuition to dive deep into your environment, investigate and follow nearly imperceptible clues, and predict and resolve undetectable issues that can wreak havoc before they get a chance to.
5. False sense of security
IT management is a complex job to do. In our experience, most IT environments are undermanaged – and leaders aren’t aware of the risks they face as a result. An IT Environment Assessment gives you an unfiltered look at the state of your environment. It audits, validates and shows you the truth to ensure your leaders have the right expectations. Is your equipment out of warranty and at risk of breaking? If something did break, how long would it take to replace? How about if your infrastructure goes down, will you be able to recover as quickly as you thought? The assessment sheds light into all of these areas and more – and of course, if you need more from your environment, the assessment provides the recommendations and action plans address issues and act on opportunities to improve how your IT environment supports your business.
Ready to consider an IT Environment Assessment?
Able One provides IT Environment Assessment solutions that are tailored to your needs. Whether your goal is to find the causes of recurring IT issues, understand if you’re ready for the cloud, or simply get peace of mind about your IT, our IT Environment Assessment will deliver the insights you’re looking for.
