As a small or medium business owner, IT requirements are not always on the top of your mind. It’s usually when your business changes, or something decides that it isn’t working that you have to put time into what you need, and even then you might not know where to start.
As an IT Support Partner, we understand that your time is limited - so let’s focus on what you need to ask yourself when it comes to IT Assessments.
Have your business needs changed?
Has your team grown? Are you dealing with more business tools or applications? Have you had a major change in business processes? Are you looking to move into the cloud? Has your IT infrastructure gotten to the point that it is time for an update?
When your business goes through significant change, chances are that your IT environment needs an assessment to identify potential gaps and determine how they could impact you. Having a current state and knowing what your operational requirements are moving forward will help you plan to ensure both your security and your budget are ready for what you are working towards.
Have you changed your IT Support Partner?
Perhaps you are introducing an IT Support partner for the first time? Or you decided you need a higher level of support? If this is the case, ensure that you ask your new IT Support partner for an IT Assessment - this allows you to have a baseline understanding of what state your environment is in before any changes are made, identifies IT infrastructure gaps in relation to where your business direction is going and provides strategic direction and recommendations to ensure your IT strategy works to get you there.
What is the best practice?
One of the questions that our clients ask us is how often do I need to have an IT Assessment done on my environment as an ongoing best practice? Our approach and recommendation would be one that ideally one be done once a year, whenever you have a major business technology change or your business requirements change. These can be smaller augmented assessments to your initial baseline IT assessment, but as your IT team, we need to be on the same page with you in alignment with your business direction and an assessment allows us to make sure that we have the information to keep your team up and running.
What should you expect in an IT Assessment?
We provide our customers with a high level overview of the current state of their environment - an overview of gaps, recommendations for changes to support their initiatives, and any flags for potential issues from hardware, software or security.
There are benefits for both your team and ours when we do an IT Assessment. It allows you to know what the state of your IT infrastructure is and if there are gaps - and when you should consider addressing them. This in turn allows you to plan your IT strategy road map with us, so that you can focus on what your business needs, what your budget is, and get the maximum value out of your IT dollars.