Be it a small or a large business, a robust and highly secure IT infrastructure is key. This gives an edge over the competitors while also enabling higher productivity and less disruptive risks.
If there is a critical vulnerability involved because of poor IT infrastructure, it leads to a major breakdown in the business.
However, once you are set up, constant check-ups, maintenance, and updates are mandatory. And that’s where IT infrastructure assessment comes into play.
To put it in simple words, an IT infrastructure assessment means a comprehensive analysis of the existing information technology systems and ensuring their quality of work. As part of the assessment, an organization typically receives an overview, recommendations for infrastructure improvements, and guidance on how best to proceed.
Many organizations that conduct IT infrastructure assessments will have a framework that they apply consistently across different organizations. This ensures that the entire IT infrastructure is systematically assessed and that no areas are missed.
Depending on the size of the organization and several other factors, the IT framework will vary and will be regularly updated to meet any sort of threats with the best practices.
A typical IT infrastructure assessment comprises the following elements:
Comprehensive Infrastructure Overview
As the IT infrastructure is a combination of a wide network of systems, software applications, and devices, you have to ensure that the designed architecture can support the complexity while also improving the overall efficiency.
Vulnerability Check
One small vulnerability can lead to a bigger impact through unexpected cyber attacks. To prevent such uncertainties, a vulnerability assessment has to be conducted where you will identify the weaknesses and address them before they arise.
Cybersecurity Scorecard
To help organizations understand their level of IT protection, a scorecard of cybersecurity can highly help. It depends on four major variables: people, systems, policy, and threats. Understanding the vulnerability with scorecards is highly convenient to improve the security for defending against attacks.
Update Policies & Procedures
It is vital to update the cybersecurity policies and procedures of the organizations from time to time as it helps to avoid forfeits due to future threats or attacks.
Find Your Strengths And Weaknesses
If you need a complete and realistic picture of your IT Infrastructure, an assessment at a high level can help. Once you know about the existing system, you could be aware of the strengths and the parts of your IT Infrastructure where an improvement is required. Starting from the management to policies & updates, it is easy to identify and govern to avoid any attacks in the future by building and implementing a robust IT infrastructure.
Early issue detection
With continuous monitoring of your IT infrastructure, you could identify any discrepancies within the network throughout the organization. This will help understand the correlations and find an appropriate solution that could manage your infrastructure before it runs out of capacity. Small issues like network congestion, memory problems, lack of maintenance and can be detected early and addressed before time. By following this methodology, your organization could turn more productive and give a better experience for your users.
Meeting Various Laws and Regulations
Identifying risks and mitigating them with long-term solutions are two important parts of corporate governance. As a result, reputation damage and penalties are obtained from minor omitted mistakes. With the help of IT Infrastructure assessment, it is possible to not discard any of the lists of software systems. Followingly, both your IT systems and the business will be secured.
Better expenditure Planning
By assessing your IT infrastructure, you will be able to accurately determine the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for your IT resources. Additionally, it can be used to determine whether certain functions performed by your current setup can be performed at a lower total cost of ownership. Furthermore, you can maximize the efficiency of your IT infrastructure by identifying areas that require infrastructure resources to be replaced to keep up with business requirements. Moreover, it allows businesses to plan how to best assign resources while dealing with obsolescence in a phased manner.
Minimizing Business Disruptions
With IT infrastructure assessment, you can discover potentially risky legacy equipment that may be supporting your business. Using the information you get, you can plan to replace the equipment and avoid any business disruption. This, in turn, not only wards off vulnerabilities but also leads to higher availability of the network & less disturbance in any way.
By conducting an IT infrastructure assessment, without causing any disruption to the existing business, you can address vulnerabilities and strengthen the IT infrastructure to be highly productive.