Business technology is highly dynamic, evolving rapidly with emerging innovations, pop cultures, business trends, and countless other influences including IT security. Not to mention the ever-growing complexity and fragility of digital systems. These are big problems for organizations relying on digital solutions to run their everyday business processes. In our line of work, we've seen many entrepreneurs make all sorts of mistakes regarding IT hardware, software, services, and operations.
IT setups are extremely sensitive. Even the slightest mistake can have devastating consequences. Let's look at the costliest mistakes IT professionals and business owners make and how you can avoid them:
Not having a solid IT plan
Some entrepreneurs invest heavily in business, logistical, and financial planning without giving much thought to their IT strategy. An IT plan guides you on utilizing the available IT resources to achieve long-term and short-term business goals. It tells you the best IT investments and decisions depending on what you want to accomplish. A solid IT plan covers the following areas:
- Envisioning and road mapping digital transformation
- Optimizing digital processes
- Managing IT resources
- IT budgeting and cost optimization
- Assessing and mitigating IT risks
Dismissing the cloud
Cloud computing is one of the fastest-growing business tech solutions today. Flexera's 2022 State of the Cloud Report shows sharp upticks in cloud adoption, utilization, and investments among small and large companies in just the last year.
The cloud brings you powerful computing resources that would otherwise be out of reach, and for just a mere fraction of the cost. Moving your workloads to the cloud also minimizes your IT footprint and the associated risks, cutting IT costs and complexities. Plus, the cloud alone can open doors to so many progressive opportunities, such as workplace flexibility, secure data management, robust communications, distributed workforce, and more.
Dismissing the cloud as just another fad is one of the most regrettable IT mistakes you could make. Yet, adopting the cloud can be as easy as switching from software licenses to software-as-a-service (SaaS) products or migrating on-premises servers to hosted platforms.
Discounting cybersecurity
Cybercrime is an inevitable risk when working with data systems. Threat actors are relentless in their quests to sabotage business operations, steal corporate data, and defraud individuals and organizations through increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. In fact, cybercrime has escalated to a national security concern with government agencies, including the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and Communications Security Establishment (CSE), warning Canadian organizations of the growing threat.
These are not baseless warnings either. A single data breach can set you back $4.24 million and ruin your business reputation and customer trust. So, ensure you tick every item in the cybersecurity checklist, including:
- Training employees on cybersecurity
- Installing the relevant security tools (firewalls, anti-malware, VPNs, etc.)
- Keeping all systems updated
- Monitoring networks and endpoints
- Backing up data
- Drafting an incident response plan
Forgetting to back up data
Do you have a reliable data backup system? Without it, you're exposing your organization to unnecessary risks. A data backup and disaster recovery system guarantees data availability at all times. Data is such a vital business asset that its fate cannot be left to chance. Keeping a data backup protects data integrity even after a cyberattack, accidental deletion, hardware/software failure, natural disaster, or IT outage.
Backing up data is a crucial cybersecurity practice. More than that, it plays a big part in business continuity planning.
Going at it alone
The tech world is a complicated space. And the fact that things change so drastically and rapidly makes figuring out the business IT landscape all the more difficult. Running a business and keeping a close eye on IT at the same time can be overwhelming. For example, you have to find the right resources, implement them, and continually check that they run properly. You also have to take care of security, compliance, licenses, IT labour, etc. — it's an endless list.
But why do all this alone when an IT expert could help you out? That's what we do here at Highway 99. We lighten the load for entrepreneurs through professional managed IT services. Our team of experts does all the heavy lifting so you can focus solely on running the business without worrying about making IT mistakes. Book a consultation session today to learn more about our IT solutions.
Featured image credit: Businessman walking photo created by kstudio - www.freepik.com
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