Did you know hourly IT downtime costs have increased by 32% in the past seven years?
If you’re worried about your IT systems going down, you should conduct an IT audit. However, if you don’t have any IT training, you may not know how to complete this task.
Read on, and you’ll learn more about how you can audit your IT infrastructure. With the help of this post, you should end up with a solid understanding of your IT setup.
Let’s begin!
Why Should You Audit Your IT Systems?
If you audit your IT systems, you will be able to spot weak points within your entire IT setup. You can then take steps to address these issues before they escalate and disrupt your entire company.
This is often known as improving the ‘technological resilience’ of your business. If you’d like to learn more about this concept, this blog post does a good job of answering the question ‘what is technological resilience?’
In any case, if you conduct an IT infrastructure audit, you will also be able to identify ways to improve the overall performance of your IT systems.
This could then allow you to reduce the costs of your IT setup, which will then free up money that can be spent elsewhere.
How Can You Audit Your IT infrastructure?
Conducting a business technology audit sounds like an intimidating task, but it’s not as hard as it sounds.
To begin with, you need to list down all the IT devices you are using in your business.
This includes computing devices such as laptops and desktop PCs, but also networking equipment such as routers. If you give employees mobile devices, make sure you track those too.
Once you’ve done this, you then need to note down how you are networking all your devices. So, if you have an office, you might have an internal ethernet network. If you have remote employees, you might be utilizing a VPN system.
Finally, you need to note down all of the services/software you’re using.
For example, if you run a graphic design firm, you might be using Photoshop. You might also be using cloud storage services to share files with clients and colleagues.
What Should You Do With This Information?
Once you’ve conducted an IT audit, you can then use this information should something go wrong.
For instance, if your network goes down, you can refer to your IT audit to identify the devices that will be affected. You can then take pre-emptive steps to curtail the damage.
Furthermore, if you ever work with an IT outsourcing company, you can give them this information. This will then help them develop a quick understanding of your systems, thereby allowing them to troubleshoot issues a lot faster.
Will You Audit Your IT Systems?
Auditing your IT infrastructure can be a somewhat dull process, but it is vital that you complete this task.
After all, if you don’t do this, you may suffer severely if there is any kind of downtime.
That is because you won’t understand the way your IT system works, and so you will struggle when it comes to identifying the root cause of an issue.
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