This blog post was updated on September 12, 2024

It was originally published on April 1, 2018

How Do You View Your IT Operations: Asset or Liability?

Have you ever felt like your IT is more of a burden than a benefit? Is your investment in technology failing to deliver the returns you expected? Are you constantly putting out IT fires instead of focusing on business growth? And do you truly understand the real cost of managing your IT?

For many small business owners, managing IT operations is a significant challenge, especially when IT staffing is minimal or nonexistent. Despite the growing reliance on technology for day-to-day operations, small businesses often don’t treat IT as a strategic priority. The reasons are understandable—limited budgets and a lack of technical expertise often dictate whether or not IT gets the attention it needs. But this attitude of "getting by" with minimal IT investment can have costly consequences in the long run.

Many business owners feel comfortable handling technology because they’ve grown up surrounded by it—setting up home networks or troubleshooting personal devices. This familiarity leads to the false assumption that managing IT at work is just an extension of those tasks. However, as your company grows, IT needs become exponentially more complex. What used to be manageable in-house quickly turns into a tangled web of technical issues that can stifle productivity.

When your "IT department" consists of a single person—often you or another key employee—IT issues inevitably pile up. This creates a bottleneck that drags down the entire organization. Productivity plummets as employees wait for technology problems to be fixed. Morale starts to drop, and before long, your IT begins to feel like a costly liability instead of a valuable asset.

Even worse, when your in-house IT expert is actually a highly paid employee with other responsibilities, you're wasting both talent and money. Instead of focusing on their primary role, they spend hours troubleshooting, patching systems, and solving urgent IT problems.

But here's the good news: your IT doesn’t have to be a constant struggle. With the right planning and preparation, you can turn your IT operations into a strategic advantage. By proactively addressing common IT challenges and implementing best practices, your business can run smoothly and avoid the productivity pitfalls that come from reactive, unplanned IT management.

This blog post breaks down some typical IT challenges that business owners face and shares 5 best practices for better managing your IT operations.

5 IT Best Practices For Business Success

1. Regular IT Audits

IT audits are crucial for identifying potential issues within your IT infrastructure before they escalate into major problems. Unfortunately, many businesses still take a reactive approach to IT management, waiting until something breaks before addressing it. This approach, while seemingly cost-effective in the short term, is ultimately a path to disaster. It's IT suicide. By the time you’re scrambling to put out fires, the damage is already done—and the costs can be staggering.

The key to successful IT management isn’t about constantly fixing problems but preventing them in the first place. Regular IT audits are an essential part of building a proactive strategy that ensures your technology is an asset, not a liability. These audits allow you to assess the current state of your IT environment and identify areas for improvement, keeping your systems running smoothly and your business protected from costly downtime or security breaches.

A comprehensive IT audit gives you a clear understanding of how technology impacts your business and helps you create a vision of what your operations could look like with the right IT support in place. This shift from constantly worrying about downtime to strategically using technology can transform IT from a frustrating expense to a key driver of your business goals.

Instead of focusing solely on IT management—handling issues as they come—shift your focus to how effectively your IT infrastructure can be used to support your business objectives. When your technology aligns with your goals, IT stops being a distraction and starts being an enabler, helping you to achieve greater efficiency, productivity, and growth.

2. Failing to Plan Is Planning to Fail

A solid IT plan is the foundation of predictable, efficient operations. Without it, your IT projects can become black holes—draining resources and money without delivering meaningful results. Proper planning, which thoroughly evaluates your IT infrastructure and identifies potential challenges ahead of time, allows you to avoid costly surprises.

Without a comprehensive IT strategy, you risk facing frequent downtime, security incidents, and breakdowns, all of which can blur together. This makes it difficult to assess the true impact of IT disruptions on your business and, more importantly, impossible to determine your actual IT costs. By creating a detailed IT plan, you can adopt best practices, monitor deviations, and establish a framework that brings predictability and control to your IT expenses.

When a plan is in place, you can easily track inconsistencies and deviations, and assess how they affect your business operations. This gives you the insight needed to analyze the root causes of issues, prevent recurring problems, and continuously improve your IT environment. In the end, a well-structured IT plan doesn't just mitigate risks—it also helps you make informed decisions that drive your business forward.

3. Focus on Cybersecurity

If you think your small business is safe from cyber threats, think again. In a 2023 survey conducted by the Identity Theft Resource Center, 73% of small business owners experienced data breaches or cyberattacks. Moreover, 15% of those businesses reported that they were unprepared to respond to a cyberattack. This vulnerability places small businesses at a higher risk of being targeted.

As a small business owner, it's crucial to safeguard your company and user data from cyber threats, which come in many forms—phishing, malware, spyware, ransomware, and more. However, tight budgets and competing priorities make it difficult for small businesses to stay updated with the latest cybersecurity trends or even ensure basic protection against malware and hacking.

To help, we've compiled some essential cybersecurity practices to protect your business:

• Stay Informed About Cyber Threats
  Keep up with tech news to stay aware of emerging threats, security patches, and bug fixes. Being proactive allows you to act quickly and prevent attackers from exploiting vulnerabilities.

• Keep Systems Updated
  Regularly update your software and systems. Patches are released to fix known vulnerabilities, and failing to update leaves your systems exposed to attackers who can exploit flaws and vulnerabilities in outdated software and applications.

• Backup Your Data
  A robust backup plan is a critical part of cybersecurity as it ensures the safety of your data in the event of a cyberattack, and allows you to securely restore your systems. In addition to data loss, regular backups are an essential safeguard against ransomware.

• Educate Your Employees
  Human error is one of the biggest cybersecurity threats. A little employee education can go a long way in mitigating the risks of human error. Ensure your staff knows about common threats like phishing and malware, and establish comprehensive security policies that cover email practices, file sharing, system updates, network access, and password management.

• Secure Your Network
  Your Wi-Fi is the gateway to your IT infrastructure, which makes the security of your network of utmost importance. Avoid using default router passwords, and implement Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) encryption, the most secure protocol. Additionally, set up a guest network with separate security measures to prevent unauthorized access to your internal systems.

• Password Management and Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
  Enhance your security with a multilayered system, combining strong passwords with One-Time Passwords (OTPs). Use a password manager like 1Password and an authenticator app such as Google Authenticator for additional protection.

4. Stay Compliant in a Rapidly Evolving Tech Landscape

With technology evolving at a breakneck pace, the regulatory landscape for your business is likely in constant flux. This makes it essential to stay on top of compliance requirements while monitoring legislative changes within your industry. Your IT strategy should be regularly updated to reflect these shifts, ensuring that your operations remain compliant and efficient.

A key step in this process is to document your IT compliance roadmap, detailing hardware and software needs. Regularly updating this roadmap, at least annually, allows you to compare your current strategy with new compliance regulations and align it with your overall business and IT objectives.

Additionally, having a robust set of privacy principles is vital—even if your business doesn’t handle sensitive client data. This should be adopted as a best practice for any organization irrespective of its size or stage of growth. These principles should also outline the steps to take in the event of a data breach, including notifying customers, informing regulatory authorities, or posting on your website. Having such a document in place ensures you're prepared to act swiftly and effectively during emergencies.

5. Boost Efficiency with a Robust Asset Management System

An effective asset management system is key to enhancing efficiency within any organization. It provides a comprehensive overview of all your assets—whether they are hardware, software, virtual machines, or cloud infrastructure—allowing you to better manage and utilize them. Additionally, such a system makes it easier to maintain a unified record of your IT infrastructure, ensuring that all components are easily accessible and readily auditable.

A well-managed asset system is also crucial for new hires, enabling them to integrate smoothly into your digital environment from their first day on the job. With all digital assets tracked and readily available, the onboarding process becomes seamless.

Moreover, an asset management system ensures that all resources are used optimally. It tracks which assets are approaching the end of their life cycle, enabling replacements to be scheduled well before any breakdowns occur. This helps prevent costly downtime and ensures continued productivity. By planning procurement with lead times in mind, you can avoid both shortages of devices and excess inventory, which results in capital being tied up in idle assets.

In addition to tracking usage, the system also helps plan and schedule purchases, generate inventory reports, and monitor contract expirations and renewals. Such a centralized management of assets gives your organization greater control, while also making it easier to scale IT infrastructure as your business grows.

Conclusion

Whether you're running a law firm, nonprofit, or startup, unless your core business is IT services, your focus shouldn't be on managing IT. Instead, you should concentrate on how technology can help you achieve your business objectives. This is where managed IT services can offer a practical and efficient solution. However, for many small business owners, outsourcing IT is a significant decision. The first step in making this decision is understanding how IT aligns with your overall business strategy.

Whether you choose to manage IT in-house or partner with a managed IT service provider, the decision should be guided by both your bottom line and how IT impacts your core competencies. It’s essential to start with a solid IT plan. A well-structured plan will not only help you avoid being overwhelmed by the various IT challenges your growing business will face, but also identify the point at which external support may be necessary.

Remember, technology should serve as a tool that enhances your productivity and helps you reach your business goals. All the technology in the world is of little value if it doesn't contribute to your success.

Do you feel you need to have better control over your IT infrastructure? Do you feel that you are not getting the expected returns from your investment in technology? Reach out to us by clicking the button below to schedule a call with our experts who will help you make the most of your investment in technology.