In order for businesses to reap these benefits and savings they must first understand the fundamental pillars that information technology must support in the business environment. Most buyers and executives know and understand that information technology is there to support the business and not vice versa, so on that note why is it so expensive? Why is it so dreaded? In order to answer these simple yet complex questions one must first understand certain pillars that support the business infrastructure. In short, the essential pillars are Business Continuity & Disaster Recover, Security and the combination of Cost Savings and Increased Efficiency. In the following paragraphs we will explore each of these pillars in more detail.
Have you ever asked yourself what would happen to your business if there were a fire or hurricane? What if a disgruntled employee sabotaged your corporation’s infrastructure? This is where Business Continuity comes in. There is also a huge difference between Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery as Business Continuity ensures that your business can function through a given outage and Disaster Recovery is bringing your business back online post-crisis. Federal guidelines state that there should be no more than twelve-hours of downtime after a given incident, does your IT company focus on this key area? If the answer is “no” then you have a recipe for disaster on your hands.
The next pillar to focus on is Security and considering that most thefts in the business world are employee-related it is essential to focus on both an internal and external means of securing your business. Again, it is about securing your business and not just your computing systems and therefore IT security needs to be an integral part of your company’s overall security approach including physical security, intellectual property security and others. Additionally, one should not lose focus on external security and should ensure that the businesses crucial data is properly firewalled, protected and safeguarded from external threats as well. When was the last time that you took a serious accounting of the information security at your business?
Our final pillar is in regard to Increased Efficiency and is directly correlated into Cost Savings. This is probably the most fundamental pillar for the decision maker to focus on before buying any new IT products or service. In our modern, office environment IT has become a “cost center”, this is in-part due to the market being flooded by under qualified service providers and especially those that don’t focus on business. In order to save money you need to ensure that your service provider is more than a simple business relationship but rather a partner that is willing to learn your business and offers a dynamic approach to helping your business become more lean and profitable secondary to the solutions that they recommend. Some examples that a qualified provider could recommend include automation in order to reduce the effective hours a particular task would take, process engineering where the business acumen is just as focused as the technical acumen and audits that focus primarily on business, technology, accounting and the merger of all three.