An IT assessment is a lot like a medical checkup. By allowing one or more IT experts to examine the IT systems, a lot of flaws can be found and corrected. It is easy to overlook the need for regular IT evaluations because they aren’t essential for everyday business. However, they are essential if you want to improve your IT situation or correct any issues that might arise. This is a chance to find your IT problems before they cause a huge problem, and that alone makes it worth the money. With that in mind, here are the top 7 benefits of an IT assessment.
1. Correction Of Security Vulnerabilities
The danger of being hacked, scammed, or robbed by cybercriminals will always be there, but you certainly don’t want to make things easy for them. If your system is operating with known security vulnerabilities, it is kind of like having a large hole in the wall. An IT assessment should include a security evaluation with recommendations for the improvement of any known issues.
2. Obtain Maximum Performance
The speed at which your IT operations run will depend on several factors. One of them is the speed of various machines on the network, as an employee can only go as fast as the technology. An IT assessment can help to find those little areas where you need extra efficiency, allowing for a smoother and more streamlined approach. Chances are, your current hardware is capable of more than it is doing.
3. Threat Awareness
Many hacking techniques rely on the use of simple con jobs as an initial step. For instance, they might impersonate a member of management or a member of your IT staff via text or email. They would then direct employees to enter their credentials on a compromised page, allowing all those credentials to be captured.
Tactics like these are only effective if people aren’t actively looking out for them. An IT assessment is a great opportunity to teach lessons to your staff about proper caution. Also, since you know where the weak points are, you know where an attacker is most likely to hit. All of this results in a greater degree of safety.
4. Budget Planning
It is easier to make an accurate IT budget when you have a good overall picture of the situation. Every company has to spend a certain amount on IT, and there is no getting around that fact. If you don’t, you will end up losing a lot more money when the system goes down. Apart from the prevention of disaster, though, an IT assessment gives you the benefit of knowing what needs to be improved and how urgent the need may be. This allows for more accurate and effective IT budget planning.
5. Easier Business Scaling
When it is time for your business to expand, your IT operations must expand accordingly. Of course, this goal becomes a lot easier to attain if you have had a thorough IT assessment done. When you already know the lay of the land, it isn’t hard to determine what must be done and how much it will cost. If you don’t do an assessment, you may find that scaling up your IT operations causes a lot of problems. That assessment acts as a guide that helps you to minimize the time and effort spent on technology upgrades.
6. Disaster Planning
An IT assessment will naturally look to see if you have a disaster response/recovery plan. It is essential that you have something like this in place, as you can never predict when the next data disaster will occur. If you don’t have a disaster recovery plan, or if it hasn’t been overhauled in a while, an IT assessment provides a great opportunity for improvement.
The security and performance planning aspects make it easier to predict what will happen in the event of a disaster. Thus, you can come up with an efficient plan to recover from such disasters with maximum speed. It is very important to share the results of this research with your employees, especially the disaster response staff. If something goes wrong, you never really know who will be in a position to respond first.
7. Settings And Tweaks
In many cases, the performance of an IT system can be greatly affected by the system settings, program settings, or other little “tweaks.” While you should have already learned how to utilize the “settings” menu, a team of IT experts can do a little more. While evaluating the total state of your IT, they can also go through your settings and suggest changes that will improve performance, safety, or usability. You might be surprised at how big of a difference such a small thing can make.
Conclusion
IT assessments make a lot of sense for businesses and private organizations alike. You could always throw caution to the wind and say “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” However, that principle doesn’t work very well in regard to IT management. You should always be looking to improve and become more efficient, and stagnation obviously isn’t a good thing when IT technology changes so fast. If you are in need of a competent IT assessment, or if you would simply like more information, you can call PCH Technologies at (856) 754-7500.