Virtually every business uses technology, whether it’s as minimal as an app on your cell phone, tablet or computer, or a suite of applications used by an office full of people with computers and devices. As a business leader, one of the many decisions you must make is how to ensure your IT infrastructure is improving and protecting your business. No matter your requirements, you must consider how you use technology in your business, and how it can be utilised to both secure and enhance your processes and efficiencies. So what is in the future for your IT?
Investment
Investing in technology now will inevitably reduce downtime in the future.
Electronics are not forever. We know this in our personal lives when cell phones die, or laptops stop working. This fact is even more true in a business. Long before a computer bites the dust, it will begin to raise problems such as running slowly or critical applications crashing.
Each of these problems is reducing productivity for the staff member using the device, and that downtime is effectively lost money. Much like a car at the end of its life, you must decide when it is no longer viable to keep throwing good money after bad, and to just replace it. Having a device replacement plan helps ensure you’ve budgeted in advance for these costs.
The same applies to your IT infrastructure. Things like routers, servers and wireless access points must be replaced on a schedule – albeit a much longer-term schedule to avoid unexpected downtime. If a piece of core infrastructure fails, the impact is considerably greater than a single computer.
Prioritising technology spend can sometimes be challenging, and it can be tempting to delay the investment until your hand is forced. The risk with that approach is once you reach that stage, you will have already lost productivity through inefficient systems. You then have the lost time and un-needed stress caused by hurriedly finding new equipment. Building ongoing technology investment into your budget will help you avoid these problems and give you the best returns in the long run.
Innovation and Automation
Innovation can seem scary. When you are changing business processes you are stepping away from the known and into the unknown, and even with extensive testing and pilot groups there is still risk associated with the change. However, researching and automating new processes is one way that your business can remain competitive in its industry.
How often do you review your daily tasks and consider whether they could be streamlined?
Administrative work is necessary but expensive. The best way to mitigate the cost of this work is to review and improve processes. You can apply innovative new tools and automate time-consuming tasks to reduce the financial burden of this work. Obviously not all work can be handled by a computer, but with the advent of AI tools, more and more tasks can be automated. By implementing innovative new ideas you can free your people to do what they do best and make your business remarkable.
Technology ultimately brings opportunity, and by training your people with new tools you can elevate them to help them keep up with the changing times and challenges they face.
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is a buzz word in business these days, but it is so much more than that. It’s a huge part of ensuring your business remains safe. Therefore it needs to be better understood and fully embraced rather than just talked about.
CERT NZ reports that New Zealand business have faced a combined financial loss of over $20m in 2022 due to cybercrime alone! There are a variety of steps that you can take to help protect yourself from cybercrime, such as implementing a managed EDR solution, enforcing MFA on all user accounts, requiring device encryption, and implementing more stringent email security requirements. These are just some of the things that you can implement to avoid falling victim to cybercrime.
Business Continuity Disaster Recovery
Business Continuity Disaster Recovery or BCDR planning is crucial for ensuring that if the worst does happen, you have a plan on how to continue operating your business and how to recover in the shortest time possible.
One component of a BCDR plan is backups. Having a solid backup strategy in place can allow you to recover from almost any event, whether it be a natural disaster, a major cyber event, a lightning storm, or even human error. In any instance, if you have secure backups, you will be able to recover with as little downtime as possible.
Cyber Insurance policies are increasingly becoming necessary for business, and they come with specific requirements.
They provide a great baseline for ensuring you protect yourself against opportunistic or malicious attacks. Some of the requirements are; implementing a managed EDR solution, enforcing MFA and configuring a robust backup strategy – which as mentioned above, are already recommended steps to improve your security posture.
These are only a couple of the things to consider when creating a BCDR plan, but by starting with these two, you will be in a good position to manage anything that comes.
Investment, Innovation, Cybersecurity & BCDR. If you don’t have one or more of these, then perhaps it is time to reconsider your IT stance.
Related: Cyber Security 101
