5 tips for managing your business IT infrastructure
As a business owner, you probably have an excellent idea of how you backup your data and share information. But if you’re overlooking other areas of your business IT infrastructure, you could be losing money and limiting your productivity. To prevent this from happening, here are some top tips for managing your IT infrastructure.
Create a disaster recovery plan
Disaster recovery becomes necessary for lots of reasons. Your hardware could fail. Or, you could be impacted by malware, or adverse weather events could bring your organization to a grinding halt.
Ultimately, you need to have a plan – with the hope never to need it. Your business IT infrastructure should feature preventative measures and a plan that outlines the ways you’ll recover. For example, you can mitigate major disaster by using cloud services so your organization isn’t susceptible to a hardware loss. Additionally, you can create a plan for remote working in case your business loses internet access.
Put old servers to rest
If your business is running old servers that are no longer in use, now’s the time to put them to rest. Dormant servers open up vulnerabilities and adds to the strain on your network. Over time, this is going to cost money in terms of risk and maintenance. And when you are managing IT Infrastructure, less is better!
Focus on your business’s demands
When creating a business IT infrastructure, make sure you’re focusing on your business’s demands rather than looking at what others are doing. Blindly following industry trends can result in wasting money on services that aren’t necessary.
One example is the use of VoIP. If your business engages in a lot of international calls, having a secure VoIP system could help you reduce associated costs by 90%. If you rarely use such technologies, you don’t stand to make such significant savings and you may be wasting money instead. Try to focus on the benefits of all the technologies you use in a similar way to ensure they’re worth your efforts.
Turn toward the future with different services
Although you should be wary of blindly following fads, it’s also important to recognize the future-focused technologies that most businesses are using. A great example of this is cloud-based services. By the end of 2020, 82% of all business workloads will reside in the cloud. As such, if you’re not yet using cloud technology, it’s probably a good idea to seriously evaluate this option.
In addition to considering different IT services now, make sure you schedule time to review your approach in the future. New essentials are always emerging and you should remain flexible enough to bring them on board.
Schedule training for your employees
Every time you implement a new IT strategy or feature, you need to train your employees so they can use it. Similarly, when you bring a new employee onboard, they’ll require training too. Never rely on someone having received training at another organization. That business may not have done things the same way you do. Ensure all employees are trained in your unique processes and keep them up to date with all legislative changes too.
Overall, managing IT infrastructure should be a thorough and detailed process. The efforts you put in now can help you remain productive, plus they’ll reduce the risk of future costs and downtime. Always make sure you tweak your infrastructure in line with business changes and plans so that your business can grow with ease.