The Role of Technology Best Practices in Managed IT Services

Technology Best Practices

Technology best practices are the documented way that each type of technology should be configured to maximize user productivity and security. The end result means that the IT systems are lightning-fast, never bogged down. They are free of ticky-tack annoyance and repeat issues, so your employees stay happy and productive. Vulnerabilities are shored up, eliminating the risk of compromise. But this isn’t by accident.

Manufacturers design their products to be usable for a wide range of scenarios, thus increasing the market size they can sell to. That is why technology contains a plethora of settings.

Take your smartphone, for instance. Tons of settings can be turned on or off, and in doing so, it affects your productivity and security.

There aren’t readily available standards about the one “right way” each piece of technology should be configured within a company to achieve these results, so bringing in a managed IT service provider to build a unique configuration is where companies see success.

A configuration is built by analyzing all the tickets that come into the support desk and identifying and evaluating new technology. It also assesses security regulations and the companies' demands and needs for technology. All of this takes time, time that a reactive managed IT provider doesn’t have, because they are consumed with solving tickets and implementing requested projects.

Read: Managed IT Services: What Good IT Support Looks Like 

The Value of Technology Audits

A technology audit reviews the current state of technology against a known set of best practices. In certain industries, the regulating body often comes up with a list of the best practices they will be auditing against. Technology audits focus on specific outcomes like security or inventory or the effectiveness of the IT group. These audits provide the company's executives a snapshot of a point in time, indicating what is out of bounce.

A technology audit is an effective tool that can help make grounded decisions. In addition, these audits come back with a list of problems that now need solving, but the current IT allowed them to exist in the first place. This sparks healthy dialog as the executives now have better visibility and can oversee who and how they get solved.

Why Current IT Methods Fall Short of Achieving Best Practices

Great! You're having annual IT auditing done for your company, and those audits are based on best practices. You're making decisions off of the findings. So why is your IT system performance still sluggish? Why are there still so many tick-tack issues? How come you're not sleeping at night knowing you're secure?

While your technology audit delivers what it intended, it is too narrowly focused and can’t reduce issues and security vulnerabilities by over 90%; it falls short of maximizing user productivity and security for the business and stifles further technology adoption.

To achieve these results, the technology audit must look different:

1. It must go wide across all facets of technology, security, business use and IT delivery.
2. It must go deep into the settings of how things are configured.
3. It must be done frequently enough (monthly) to keep up with technological changes.
4. There must be immediate remediation to align with the best practice standard to realize the value.
5. There needs to be an outlet informing the company's executives of the impending business risk their current technology configuration holds to make prudent timely decisions.

Again, this takes time that a reactive managed IT provider doesn’t have because they are consumed with solving tickets and implementing requested projects.