4 Ways to Strengthen Your IT Posture

You already have plenty on your plate. There's no need to make your life harder with IT problems. Here we explore 4 ways to avoid trouble that won't cost you a thing.

Picture this scenario: A client reaches out to you for information. You try to access the system that holds it, and the information just won't come up. You ask your colleagues to see if they can reproduce the same problem. To your dismay, everyone is down. So everyone starts looking for a fix. Meanwhile, the client still doesn't have the information and your employees aren't busy doing what they do best. For you, this system outage means costs to get everything running again, but it's also the wages of employees who couldn't be productive, along with lost revenue from clients who aren't satisfied.

It's a sign that the health of your IT isn't optimal, and here are a few avenues to improve how you manage your technology.

Tip #1: Use high availability

Symptoms– Systems stop working.– Employee productivity is affected or, worse, they can no longer work.– It's hard to serve clients during the outage.

Sometimes downtime is brief or shows up as latency rather than a complete service outage. Yet all that accumulated downtime weighs on your workflow, and your company's profitability takes a significant hit.

Possible solutions– Proactive system monitoring.– Knowing your systems and your reality well.

If an employee is more capable than average in this area and takes on the role of part-time IT lead, that's fine as long as you can count on someone. The key is to account for the time spent on tech support within their workload. Have you asked this person, as much as your other employees, about their quality of life at work?

Tip #2: Know who to contact

Which brings us to the topic of key contacts.

Symptoms– Downtime that drags on.

ChallengesEmployees can be left stranded without tech support, not wanting to burden colleagues who are already very busy. Those who are more comfortable with IT may also find themselves with responsibilities they never asked for.

In the end, all the employees figure things out among themselves because they're all little ninjas wearing many hats. However, the group effect has the opposite consequence, where no one is responsible anymore.

Possible solutions–Seek outside help for recommendations and system implementation.– When you're looking for help, you can always ask whether the firm offers training so you can keep some autonomy in managing your IT environment.– Building a relationship with a reliable partner can lighten the load, knowing you can always ask questions when in doubt.

It's important to ask for help when needed and to consider the real workload that falls on the employee or employees. Whether it's a firm, a friend, an employee, or a contact, what matters is having someone you can count on.

Tip #3: Take cybersecurity seriously

Symptoms–You take the risk of sharing shared-account passwords internally.– If there were a security breach, you wouldn't know what steps to take to mitigate the risks.– Your insurer asks you to put solutions in place, but you don't know how or even how it will help your business.

ChallengesWhere to start? That's the question.Keep in mind that there are several solutions to meet the same needs. Some are universal (like two-factor authentication) but others require more customization, and not every solution offered is suited to your company's needs. (For example: backup plans)

*Possible solutions*–Use unique accounts for each employee.– (If that's not possible, use a PAM solution).– Use a password manager.– Don't reuse passwords across multiple platforms.– Use *SSO* as much as possible (Single sign-on).– Use two-factor authentication.– Never pay a ransom.

These are a few things you can put in place to mitigate the risks.Cybercrime is becoming more and more sophisticated, so hackers are getting in with greater ease. To give you an idea, roughly 1 in 5 Canadian businesses was hit by a cybersecurity incident in 2021, according to Statistics Canada.

Tip #4: Maximize your existing tools for workflows

Symptoms– You have 2 to 3 main tools you work in, which makes the process more complex as you switch from one platform to another.– Accessing and organizing the file system is difficult.– You find yourself working reactively to whatever requests come up.– Employee arrivals and departures are time-consuming.

ChallengesTools are meant to optimize our processes and workflows, but they can quickly become a burden when there are too many. If there's an app for every need, using each one adds friction, since some tools may have similar functions and the line gets blurry as to which to use in which context.

On top of that, you have to manage licenses and user accounts for all the applications and tools, which takes more effort during arrivals and departures. Is your team being asked to grant permissions and create user accounts as people need specific access?

Possible solutions– By setting up *SSO*, you can grant access to multiple applications from one place.– Use centralized groups, which simplifies access management.– Document a template of the access and equipment a new user needs in the form of a *checklist.*

Onboarding a new employee when internal resources are scarce isn't easy. MMO uses the mentorship method, which has proven effective time and again. It involves assigning a mentor to support the new user with all their requests and to ensure their full integration into the company. The same goes for departures: there must be a clear process to ensure someone is responsible for removing access, rotating inventory, handling licenses, data retention periods, and account archiving.

Conclusion

All the points mentioned above share a common denominator: *context switching*. You know, when things pile up and you flit from one task to another, thinking you're getting several things done at once. The reality is that it's just an illusion, and humans aren't able to handle multiple tasks at the same time. In fact, we jump from one thing to another very quickly, which considerably reduces efficiency.

In short, here are the main things that trigger context switching at every level:

– Complete or partial system outages.– Searching for or asking colleagues for a solution when downtime drags on.– Struggling between easy access to information and secure access to data.– Constant notifications.– Switching from one tool to another repeatedly to carry out a single task.– All the solutions suggested above help significantly reduce employees' context switching, which improves workflow efficiency for everyone and ultimately your company's profitability.

MMO has to manage this reality on a regular basis, and we constantly refine our methodology to optimize our efficiency. IT is present in every industry, and we share our passion every day by helping our clients find the best solutions tailored to their needs on an ongoing basis.

Don't hesitate to get in touch with us, we'd be happy to talk.The MMO Techno team