Year-end Technology Review Priorities
As the year enters the last quarter, now is the time to plan for the future. Businesses are made up of people, and people begin the new year with hope for growth and improvement. Today, business operations frequently depend on technology. Review your company’s IT for optimization of tech and its use.
A year-end technology review provides opportunity to focus in on several areas of your IT. Take time to focus on improvements to increase your bottom line. Also, be on the lookout for tactics to take to reduce the risk of a costly cyberattack. Ransomware attacks just keep spiking, with no sign of slowing down
This recent study by Deloitte focused on digitally advanced small businesses. Small businesses making smart use of technology run well ahead of their peers. Here are a few of the ways they excel:
- Earn 2x more revenue per employee
- Experience year-over-year revenue growth nearly 4x as high
- Had an average employee growth rate over 6x as high
The bottom line is that companies that use technology efficiently do better. These companies are also more secure, paying less for cybersecurity breaches. According to IBM, businesses that maintain an incident response plan reduce the costs of a data breach by 61%. Using security AI and automation effectively can lower costs by 70%.
This year-end, schedule some time to do a technology review with your IT team or managed IT provider. Doing so will set you up for success and security in the coming year.
Priorities For Reviewing Business Technology at Year-End
An effective year-end technology review drills down on all areas of your IT infrastructure. Security, efficiency, and bottom-line considerations represent the key drivers for future initiatives.
Technology Policies
When technology policies grow outdated, team members stop following them. Review all IT policies to see which of them need updating to reflect new conditions. For example, if you now have remote or hybrid staff, make sure your device use policy reflects this.
When you update policies, communicate the new policy clearly to employees. Doing so gives them a refresher on important information. After all, people forget things since onboarding.
Disaster Recovery Planning
When did your company last participate in an incident response drill? Is there a published, comprehensive list of steps for employees to follow in the case of a natural disaster or cyberattack?
Schedule time to look at disaster recovery planning for the new year. At the same time, make out the schedule for preparedness drills and training in the coming months.
IT Issues & Pain Points
There’s no point in going through a big IT upgrade without considering employee pain points. By ignoring employee issues, you’ll inevitably miss some golden opportunities to improve staff productivity and well-being.
Survey your employees in detail on how they use technology. Ask open ended questions about their favorite and least favorite apps. Ask what struggles they face in their day to day work. Let them tell you how they feel technology could improve to improve their jobs. This, in turn, benefits your business. Doing this sort of survey also helps you target the most impactful improvements.
Privileged Access & Orphaned Accounts
Perform a detailed audit of all privileged accounts as part of your year-end review. Over time, even without malice, permissions can be misappropriated. These misallocated permissions leave your network at a higher risk of a major attack.
During the audit, ensure that only those key personnel that need them have admin-level permissions. The fewer privileged accounts you have in your business IT structure, the lower your risk. Compromised privileged accounts password open the door to major damage by cybercriminals.
While going through your accounts, also track down all orphaned accounts. Close these and save the data elsewhere because they’re no longer used. Leaving them active poses a security risk.
IT Upgrade & Transformation Plans for the New Year
Making IT upgrades and decisions “on the fly” often comes back to bite you. Instead, plan out a strategy ahead of time, so you can upgrade in an organized way.
Have a vulnerability assessment performed by a third party. This gives you a list of potential problems your company should address while pointing out blind spots. Eliminating vulnerabilities improves your cybersecurity. Planning ahead allows you to budget for your upgrades and avoid surprise expenses.
Cloud Use & Shadow IT
Review your use of cloud applications. Are certain apps hardly used? Do you have redundant apps in your cloud environment? Reviewing these apps lets you cut waste and save money.
Also, look for uses of shadow IT by employees. Shadow IT are cloud applications that are being used for work but did not go through approval by the IT department. These apps aren’t integrated into the company’s cybersecurity strategy, but often have sensitive data. Management may not even be aware of them. Remove this security risk by either closing the accounts or officially approving them.
Customer-Facing Technology
Don’t forget to go through the customer’s experience of your technology infrastructure. Find your website and engage with the contact process as a customer would.
If you get frustrated by things like site navigation, then your customers and leads will too. Include optimizations to your customer-facing technology in your new year plans.
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