Key Webinar Takeaways: 4 Hidden IT Risks

Last week, Ryan Miller, our Director of Infrastructure Management, presented our latest webinar, “4 Hidden IT Risks: Learn How to Find & Mitigate Them.”

This webinar covered how the combination of cyber risks, the explosion of data, and remote workforces have exposed significant risks in aging infrastructures, putting many IT organizations in defense mode.

Here we will break down risks your organization may face and provide actionable measures you can take to overcome them. After this glimpse, check out our full webinar below.

1. IT and Business Have Misaligned Priorities

Often overlooked, misaligned priorities between IT and business is a hidden risk are that can lead to ineffective IT investments, overengineering, lack of standardization, or migrating on the wrong timeline. 

Some practices to help align IT and the greater business include:

• Determine and balance the priorities
• Embrace standardization to avoid over-engineering
• Keeping pace with the business and communicating the right timeline for migration

2. Miseducation on Modern Data Protection

Today, firms must plan for cyber-attacks, political unrest, pandemics, equipment failures, and many other scenarios. The risk of not modernizing your data protection can lead to a longer time to recover, lack of alignment with infrastructure, and missing redundancy.

Some practices to help modernize data protection include:

• Understand how your data is protected now compared to what the ideal state is.
• Structure data strategically with disaster recovery in mind.
• Design for disaster recovery by avoiding single point of failures in the cloud.

3. User Support Strategy

There is a critical need for IT leaders to build strong ties withinn their business to ensure alignment and to also remember that users are people with unique perspectives, not just tickets. The lack of attention to support strategies leads to poor user support experiences, lack of alignment with the organizational norms, and lost productivity.

Some practices to improve your user experience include:

• Understand the current state of how support works.
• Investigate cultural norms and how users consume technology and support in the business.
• Build out a migration strategy to move to the most efficient model for your business.

4. Smart Outsourcing

Across the board, almost all organizations are outsourcing something, but without planning, you may end up outsourcing the wrong items, holding on to non-strategic functions or outsourcing at the wrong time.

Some practices to strategically outsource your IT:

• Review your business growth strategy and align accordingly.
• Know the costs associated with the different elements of IT, both direct and indirect.
• Determine what makes sense to outsource and what does not.

Not every outsourcing solution looks the same. It’s important to assess what makes sense for your business at this time because that answer is always changing.

As the workplace constantly evolves, businesses that mitigate risk successfully are constantly evaluating all the points above. At Dataprise, we can help you get a jump start in mitigating risk with a ‘no cost’ IT environment assessment. Find out more below!