The Top 5 Benefits of an IT Assessment
Technology
In the world of information technologies and hyper-fast transmission of information, having bombproof IT equipment and systems can be vital for your business.
IT systems allow you to store your data safely, as well as communicate with your teams at lightning speeds, and without the ability to do those two, you’ll find your business quickly going under.
This is why most businesses are recommended (in the least) to perform regular checkups and tests of their systems and equipment to make sure both of those elements are performing their job properly.
Now, many businesses have their own internal IT teams and departments, but those who don’t, or require an outsider’s help, hire an IT agency. At that point, the IT agency is performing what is called an IT Assessment service.
So, what is this service? What does it entail? And most importantly, what are the benefits of an IT assessment? Read on and find out!
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What is An IT Assessment?
Simply put, an IT assessment is a “checkup” of your IT systems and equipment.
However, more elaborately put, an IT assessment has a much greater scope than a simple check of the systems. The assessment team/agency will not only perform the said checkup, but make suggestions, advise, and present best practices in the industry.
The team will also perform various measurements of your system’s overall performance, as well as the performance of individual elements, figuring out bottlenecks and potential breaches in security.
Most importantly, however, an exhaustive IT assessment will grant you insight into the potential that lies within your equipment and systems so that you may tap into it in the future.
Benefits of an IT Assessment
Now that we have an idea of what an IT assessment entails, let’s figure out some benefits.
Impartiality
One of the smaller benefits of an IT assessment that isn’t obvious at first glance is impartiality. Namely, the impartiality of the agency that performs the assessment.
Like we said in the intro, many businesses have their own IT departments – people that take care of the IT within their own companies. However, with routine comes oversights, and your IT department runs the risk of becoming trapped in that routine.
Essentially, your business might fall into the trap of the saying, “that’s just how we do things around here,” for better or worse. At this point, you’re running the risk of becoming complacent and postponing fixing problems, or doing routine checkups, or forgetting to update your systems.
And that complacency can cost you. In fact, according to statistics, revenue loss due to IT downtime reaches up to $26.5 billion across America and Europe.
This is where an independent IT company jumps in.
Being an independent contractor, the agency won’t hesitate to point out problems in your setup and will be quick to uncover problems that may have fallen through the cracks.
Indeed, this outside-looking-in perspective that an IT company has can be of great help in perceiving the bigger picture at the end of the day. And this bigger picture will help you realize your system’s shortcomings and how to avoid them turning into major issues.
Hardware Assessment and Scalability
One of the surface-level benefits of a project of this type is hardware assessment. An IT company performing the assessment will make its first task to document your inventory and determine both its short-term and long-term viability.
We already mentioned that companies lose a lot of revenue due to IT downtime. Unfortunately, much of this could have been prevented with proper maintenance, regular checkup and timely assessments. Many such cases happen due to old and faulty equipment, and the costs of replacing that equipment would have been much lower in the long run than dealing with the fallout.
Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash
But, say you have the proper equipment in your workplace. Is the IT company just going to nod its head and leave things as is?
No, of course not. Part of hardware assessment is also assessing the scalability of said hardware. Your equipment may be good now. But as your business grows and develops, you may find your needs exceed your capabilities.
Thus, the job of the assessment team is also to check whether you’ve got sufficient infrastructure to facilitate further growth. It is their task to tell you where you might have bottlenecks and which equipment might cause you issues once you decide to upgrade.
All in all, the main surface-level benefits of having your system assessed are that you’ll identify faulty and obsolete equipment, as well as establish whether or not your base infrastructure is good enough to allow the implementation of new technology in the future.
Improved Security
Security is of the utmost importance for any business, especially those that deal with other people’s personal data. Just in the second quarter of 2022, there have been 52 million data breaches and cyber attacks. Though this is a marked reduction compared to the previous quarter, that’s still a high enough number to take your security a lot more seriously.
And this is where an IT assessment comes in. In fact, marked improvement in security is one of the main selling points of an IT assessment.
Like we said before, routine breeds complacency, and, due to complacency, a lot of things can fall through the cracks. When those cracks begin to fill up, however, they open up, and, before you know it, the system you thought was previously secure is not painfully inadequate.
But lack of updates and general complacency when it comes to security aren’t your only problems. Hackers and cyber criminals are getting ever more clever, and they’re constantly devising new techniques, opening new avenues of attack on your data.
An IT assessment can help you stay one step ahead of the thieves (or, at least, keep up the pace). IT agencies are professionals, and it is their job to constantly monitor the development of malicious techniques and create ways and new layers of security in order to thwart them.
In the end, the security of your company’s data is vital if you want to keep yourself, your assets, and your employees safe, and a thorough assessment session might be just the right thing to identify keyholes in your security and, ultimately, plug them up.
[Source: Pixabay]
Staff Education and Uplifting of Talent
One of the major indirect benefits for your company and a direct benefit to your employees is the education of said employees.
You see, the purpose of the assessment is not only to deal with the hardware and software in your business but also to engage with the people working for it.
From the very top, the CEO and the management board, through the middle management, all the way down to the simple salaryman, the purpose of the assessment is to educate everyone within a workplace on the best security practices, the best systems, and the best equipment for the job.
With that in mind, an IT support company won’t just make suggestions on the possible improvements to your overall systems, but it will also teach the decision makers how to make those systems more efficient and the workers how to use them to the best of their ability.
Essentially, an IT assessment’s main goal is to improve your systems and equipment and uplift your talent by improving their understanding of those two elements.
Improvement in Performance
The primary goal of IT assessment is, of course, to see a marked improvement in the performance of the overall system of a particular company.
To that end, the IT agency will work hard to measure your systems’ existing quantitative and qualitative performance, then identify possible problems.
After this, let’s look at suggestions on what can become improved for the systems. And which elements of the systems, in particular, are causing issues. Whether due to incompatibility, equipment age, improper use, or untrained staff.
Finally, an IT assessment will determine how to address those issues. Furthermore, what can become done to streamline the entire system in order to eke out the most performance possible out of it.
At this point, the IT agency will work closely with the top brass. In order to figure out how these changes can become made.
As we said before, the main overall goal of an assessment is to educate the decision makers on their own system and equipment, and that extra knowledge will let them make more informed decisions when it comes to scaling and improving the system moving forward.
Final Words
In the end, the advantages of an IT assessment are very clear and concise. The only major disadvantage to having your IT systems looked over by a third party is the possibility of a data leak due to the IT agency being a third party.
However, this issue is very easily overcome. There is a myriad of properly vetted and firmly established IT firms. Ones that will more than willingly offer their services to you. And you only need to do a little bit of research before you settle for the right one.
Ultimately, doing an IT assessment is a no-brainer for savvy businessmen. Because those people are truly aware that to grow a business. Moreover, you must have a very solid foundation upon which that business can run.
Author bio : The Top 5 Benefits of an IT Assessment
Travis Dillard is a business consultant and an organizational psychologist based in Arlington, Texas. Passionate about marketing, social networks, and business in general. In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing for DigitalStrategyOne. The Top 5 Benefits of an IT Assessment
The Top 5 Benefits of an IT Assessment
