The Importance of Regular IT Assessments and Audits for Businesses
At Acropolis, we provide IT support to a large range of businesses. In our years, we’ve found that one thing holds universally true across all industries—if you want your IT to work reliably and be cost-effective, you have to take stock of your infrastructure and systems first.
In other words, long-term IT planning begins with an IT audit. In fact, regular audits are even better as they provide consistent information that improves your IT outcomes and the business as a whole.
What Is Involved in an IT Audit?
To understand the value of regular IT audits, you should familiarize yourself with the process and expected outcomes of an audit. When you plan an IT audit with Acropolis, we’ll discuss the scope of the audit with you, making recommendations before you commit to the process.
Overall, we will meticulously review and assess your IT assets and process to see what does and doesn’t work well for your business specifically. We also can perform efficiency reviews that examine tools, techniques, workflows, and more to find opportunities to improve communications and operational efficiency while eliminating redundancies.
We can perform a security audit that looks for cybersecurity vulnerabilities from a hacker’s perspective in order to resolve them before they can be exploited.
We also provide data and systems analyses to see how you are handling data and what could be improved to ensure data governance.
Our asset review checks your technology to see if anything is out of date or showing excessive signs of wear. Technology that has reached End of Support stops receiving patches, leaving your organization vulnerable to bugs and cyber threats.
Lastly, a personnel review can explore more efficient ways to deploy your IT personnel in order to improve performance and reduce expenses.
Why Are Regular Audits Important?
Considering the range of inspections available from IT audits, you can already imagine some of the benefits that stem from consistent, scheduled reviews. That said, we think it’s worth going into detail to discuss each of the major benefits you can expect from your audits.
Spending Efficiency
First, we need to talk about spending efficiency. A standard IT audit goes through all of your IT assets and costs and aims to calculate exactly what value you are extracting from that spending.
As an example, upgrading a central server for your business might eliminate downtime problems and improve workflows. This could raise revenue across the business with a simple investment.
Alternatively, reviewing how you deploy your IT personnel could reveal better ways to distribute responsibilities that enable you to get more IT value from fewer man hours.
These are just two of many possibilities. The point of the review is to put numbers on your IT spending and the value it generates from the business. On top of that, the audit will create recommendations to improve those numbers, ultimately, optimizing your expenses.
Security
Data security is critical for any business. Whether you handle customer/client data, internal data, government data, or anything else, a data breach could be disastrous for your business. Similarly, cyber attacks bring down businesses of all sizes, and few can afford a ransomware attack without suffering serious losses.
A security audit exists for the sole purpose of identifying vulnerabilities in your security and resolving them. Doing this on a regular basis helps you stay ahead of quickly evolving cyber attacks and threats, like widely accessible Ransomware as a Service (RaaS). It’s an essential component of a robust cybersecurity posture.
Simply preventing problems is valuable enough, but there is a financial component to consider. Cyber attacks cost businesses billions of dollars every year. Audits cost considerably less.
Scalability
Most businesses plan to grow over time. If that sounds familiar, then you already know that your IT resources need to grow with your business. This is the concept of scalability. How much do you need to spend on IT and which IT assets will keep up with your business model and budget?
IT audits answer that question, and they do it in explicit detail.
Regular audits can identify where your technology is and isn’t scaling with your business. On top of that, regular audits allow the analysis to keep up with changes to your business. If your trajectory dramatically changes and bucks current trends, the regularity of the audits allow you to reevaluate quickly and adapt your IT strategy to keep up.
Compliance
On a completely different note, Acropolis can perform technology compliance audits. We can bake them into a broad audit plan, or we can perform this specific service. In either case, we are comparing your IT deployment to regulations that exist in general and for your industry.
Anyone in healthcare can tell you that HPAA comes with a lot of specific rules and regulations, and getting caught out of line can be extremely expensive and dangerous.
Ultimately, this is true for many industries. At Acropolis, we have regulatory experts who can carefully review the latest versions of regulations and requirements. We can perform an audit around your specific business requirements and eliminate the guesswork to ensure that your operations are inside the lines. And, if we find something out of line, we can help you correct it quickly.
Strategy and Planning
Beyond these specific benefits, there’s a general advantage to having regular IT audits. They generate data.
We’re not just talking about a few measly data points here; IT audits carefully review all of your equipment and processes. That generates large volumes of precise and meaningful data, and we can pair that data generation with modern analytics.
The audits will show you exactly how your technology is performing along a wide range of metrics. This comparison can help steer the course of the entire business.
Here’s a simple example. Say you invest in an online marketing program. Usually, that investment comes with consistent data tracking, so you know exactly which outreach efforts perform the best. Maybe your social media posts are generating the most traffic. Maybe it’s pay-per-click Google ads. Whatever the case may be, you have those numbers without an IT audit.
How does the audit help?
It will demonstrate exactly how much of your marketing program is in-house vs out-of-house, and it can show you how you can shift from one direction to the other, and which shift would be more cost-effective.
Keep in mind, that’s just one specific, niche example. Your IT audits can generate data along many different axes, and all of them inform your business strategy by providing a deeper layer of empirical insights that can fortify your approach.
If you think IT audits can benefit your business, contact Acropolis today. We’ll be happy to discuss options and help you form a quality IT plan tailored to your specific concerns.