A walk through our IT audit process, and how it helps you gain knowledge, perspective, and control over something that affects all areas of your business: your IT.
Transcript
IT affects every aspect of your business—from operations, marketing, sales, customer relationships, and more. Understanding your current IT solution is just as important as understanding a home inspection when you’re buying a house. Whether you work with an outsourced IT partner, handle it in house, or have no support at all, there are many things that can get overlooked, and all those little things can add up to big issues.
Now, let’s jump into how that can be accomplished. These pictures are from a current Anderson Technologies client. At the time they were taken, they were a prospect. And the prospect had an existing IT provider where their main concern with that provider was the utter lack of communication. You can see there’s some obvious signs of a problem: the hot mess of wires, an overloaded power strip. In the second picture, it’s not as obvious, but the gate to the server’s wide open, there’s old appliances on the rack, and unused equipment laying around. What you can’t see that our IT Blueprint discovered was a server was dangerously close to end of life, which their current provider at the time did not communicate. That’s a really costly fix when it’s an emergency.
Here’s that client after they became a client of ours. You can see both setups are more organized, and old or unused equipment’s been removed. Whether you have a little IT knowledge or nothing at all, I think we can agree that these after pictures are much better than the before pictures.
These changes immediately affected the client, as they were no longer concerned their server would fail and impressed with how much we communicated with them. They understood why changes needed to actually be made.
Our process starts with you—having a conversation about what’s important to you, your business, what scares you about technology, how your day-to-day can improve with good technology—we really want to hear about it all. Also how technology relates to your entire business and not a computer operating.
A great IT partner can really drive business success, and we want to be that partner. You can see here, our 360 IT Blueprint starts with four quadrants: infrastructure, security, managed support and services, and telecommunications. This grid is given a score based on a weighted scoring system. Here you can see the big picture of where your IT network stands. This overarching score is going to be 19. Each quadrant is then broken down into subcategories, where we can take a deeper dive into the findings in that area.
You may have guessed from what you see that red is not good. Red can mean a lot of things, maybe something essential is missing, out-of-date, not secured. Our goal is to get you into the green quickly and cost-effectively.
This example shows us this prospect was not as protected as their current IT partner had led them to believe. When we go into this infrastructure quadrant, it’s extremely important. It’s the foundation of your network. It’s like the foundation of your house. There’s no point in locking doors and windows if the foundation is crumbled away. This quadrant looks at things like your server age, workstation hardware, business continuity, and more. The last thing you want is for your business to stop operating for any period of time because of a network failure. This quadrant also helps prioritize repairs and budget future funds, so you’re not dumping money into emergency fixes.
Security for us at Anderson Technologies is the pinnacle of everything we do to protect our clients. Our clients’ businesses are their livelihoods, and we take that extremely seriously. New threats present themselves every single day, and we’re relentless when it comes to staying on top of those threats. This quadrant reveals your current approach to security and how effective your defenses are. We take into account methods for remote work, two-factor authentication, internet security, antivirus, and more. Managed support and services is exactly that: how your current provider supports and services you. Are they proactively communicating with you? Are they updating you on ticket status? Are they planning your IT budget so that you don’t have any hidden costs? This quadrant was not good with this prospect because they were so unhappy with their current solution. Here at Anderson Technologies we really take communication to the next level. We’ve only lost one client in six years, and that is because of an acquisition, not because of bad service. Our client success model really drives us and helps us put our clients first with our client success manager acting as their advocate. And this is something we do for all clients, whether you have two employees or 200.
After digging into each area, we take a step back and look again at the big picture. While telecommunications is a major part of IT, this prospect had no support from their current IT partner in this quadrant, so we had no information to examine. But if we take a look, again, their score’s pretty low, 27 out of 100. There’s a lot of red which is alarming considering they have a managed IT provider. This report was actually the determining factor of this prospect becoming our client.
A few months after this client onboarded, we conducted the 360 IT Blueprint again, and you can see the considerable change. We educated our client so, when given decisions about their IT, they were knowledgeable and actually felt comfortable making those decisions. So again, we take a look at the security. Before it was a lot of red, and now we’re at that high security audit mark. Some of these things are really easy to put in place too, like password policies, two-factor authentication, security awareness training. Are you training your employees? Again, it’s all about education and communicating between you and your partner.
Are you ready to make more informed business decisions and learn about your current state with a 360 IT Blueprint? If so, let us know. We’re excited to talk!
