OneTeam IT shares how to get the most out of your IT strategy
As a business owner or manager, it’s sometimes difficult to find the right questions to ask about your IT strategy, to ensure that it is all running smoothly. OneTeam IT shares some simple questions to ask your IT team that ensure for more efficient, seamless use of technology in the workplace, as well as improving the security of your team’s devices and network.
1. Preventative vs Reactive.
Day-to-day priorities can often mean your team won’t have time to practice preventative strategies and hence end up reacting to problems after they have occurred. This is closely related to the issue of fixing symptoms, rather than root causes of IT related issues.
A good question to ask the IT team is: “Are there any areas where the business would benefit from some preventative actions, rather than wait for problems to arise”?
Another way to determine this is to have an objective look at the ticket patterns within your service desk system, if available.
In the simplest of terms, ask: “Have we got any recurring issues, where we don’t know the root cause”?
2. Restoring data and systems
Data protection quite rightly emphasises keeping copies of production data, usually daily, if not replicated in real time. While this is a key strategy, often the missing piece of the puzzle is a recovery or restore test of the data or systems involved. You can’t take it for granted that your data or systems will magically reappear, so a good question is: “How successful was our last data restore test”?
Sometimes, asking such a question kicks off further discussions about core infrastructure such as your storage environment. At this point, it might be appropriate to review your current environment and compare it to what is available from vendors like IBM or Predatar, to provide a more resilient storage environment that supports your key business continuity objectives.
3. Vulnerability scans
Cyber-attacks are a persistent threat, as the attackers utilise automation to ensure they are constantly prowling the internet and connected technology systems, seeking vulnerable entry points to private networks. To paraphrase a quote from another time: “They only have to be successful once”.
Our networks have lots of pieces or ‘moving parts’. It’s not unknown for a device to remain connected when it should not have been (like a NAS or Network Attached Storage), or for a device to go unpatched, so a vulnerability scan is a great tool to keep your environment healthy and protected from attack. Vulnerability scans are non-intrusive and don’t disrupt users, but they do identify areas of weak defence against a cyber-attack.
The question to ask is: “When was the last time we ran a vulnerability scan, and what did we do about the results”?
4. BYOD user protection
In these times of flexible working arrangements, a key item is the number of BYOD or staff owned devices accessing your corporate network. In the ideal world, these devices are all virus and spam protected to the same degree as your internal devices, however that is not always the case.
A question for your IT Team is: “How are we ensuring that our staff owned devices are as secure as our internal devices”?
5. User behaviour
Unfortunately, the majority of cyber security problems have their root cause in user behaviour. Clicking on links in dodgy emails, poor password hygiene, and bringing files into the network that have not been scanned are just some of the ways we can be our own worst enemy.
The question to ask is: “What are we doing to ensure our user behaviours are continuously improving”?
The managed services team at OneTeam IT are on-hand, around the clock, to provide your business with the support and guidance you need, so you can focus on what matters. Get in touch to have a conversation about how we can help manage your IT services and find the right digital solutions for you today.
