What is the goal of a business? Growth, of course! And growth depends upon various business initiatives and strategies for which the IT department is responsible. But as the company expands, so does the burden placed upon IT resources. Thus, not only does IT have to take on more projects, but individual attention must be paid to each of these tasks, otherwise, there is the possibility that the success of the organization might get hampered.
However, there is a catch – in spite of rapidly expanding workloads, IT often lacks the additional resources for handling the critical tasks at hand. So, the important question is here is – how can you ensure your company’s evolution yet consistently offer innovation without adding additional IT resources?
The only solution for IT at this stage is to concentrate on what’s important. This might require the department to take a closer look at the reasons behind the consumption of management time and technical resources. The ideal place to start is the basic IT infrastructure within the organization itself. Here are some of the best practices enterprises can adopt to free up IT resources.
IT resources: Evaluation of infrastructure and time management
A business needs to figure out what it can control, and what is beyond its capabilities. The prime area of focus should, however, be the IT infrastructure as well as the associated process management. They need to understand if their infrastructure choices within the business is reducing or adding to the process.
Let’s take a look at this from the perspective of storage. When you are entirely dependent upon a regular file system infrastructure, a lot of your time is wasted in developing RAID groups, creating shares and volumes, laying out those shares or volumes over traditional disks, etc. This should all be done for storage, which while important, cannot be deemed a high-value initiative in the larger scheme of things.
Understand which solutions decrease process management
Take your time to identify which parts of your infrastructure take up the maximum amount of your IT time. The following step should involve the identification of solutions that decrease process management. Check if there is the scope of infrastructure choices capable of shaving some time off from the amount required to handle all the data protection, restore, and storage activities properly. You should also brainstorm possible ways to unify the systems throughout various areas so that you do not have to deal with an isolated IT infrastructure. Try to identify solutions to decrease the time spent on huge projects such as data migration.
Remove all backup and other time-consuming processes
The protection of company data is extremely important, but regular backup solutions waste a lot of time for IT organizations. This is exactly the sort of thing that IT must reevaluate. Since the cloud has now become a backup target of sorts, you no longer have to fully rely on extended backups that take up the majority of the day. Find alternate methods that are not only more efficient and powerful, but are capable of protecting unstructured data and protect businesses.
Use cloud-based financial management systems
If you are a nonprofit organization or smaller for-profit company, you often lack the resources necessary to hire a full-fledged IT team. And whatever employees you have are often called upon to work on other processes, thereby pushing their core duties for a later time or neglecting them altogether. As a result, many nonprofits and smaller companies are turning to cloud-based financial management systems with the intention of improving their operations, strengthening the oversight when it comes to grant projects and fund accounting, and reducing the amount of IT resources needed to improve security features.
If you are interested in future growth, then a cloud-based system is more of a “when” than an “if.” And the earlier your business adopts such a system, the quicker you will can streamline your process, enhance the efficiency level, and free up IT resources.
Establish stronger point solutions
A great way to limit process management is consolidating the different point solutions. IT leaders often complain about the complex and sometimes incompatible combination of infrastructure solutions they have to rely on. While one solution exists for storage, another is there for backup, yet another exists for mobile access, collaboration, and disaster recovery. With each new solution that gets added to the enterprise structure, it brings with it new requirements for management upgrades, refreshes, and patches. In the greater scheme of things, this forces IT to expend more of their time and resources. The solution here is quite straightforward, actually – if you are able to locate systems capable of unifying two or more, or even all, such point solutions, then you have a shot at simplifying the environment and freeing up a considerable amount of resources.
Always pick scalable tools for management
IT must ideally be treated as a sort of growth facilitator. What it means is that this particular business segment holds the responsibility for improving agility and efficiency of the enterprise as a whole. There are several management tools that give you the power to unify the IT infrastructure, thereby allowing you to manage various aspects such as access control, storage, data protection, and others from a distance. This can prove hugely valuable for the business.
A unified approach like this toward infrastructure, where silos get substituted with a single overarching system, makes scaling a whole lot simpler. It is more convenient to incorporate new locations and offices when the IT consists of a single, unified infrastructure.
The implementation of these five practices will allow your IT team to allocate more time to your company’s strategic initiatives sooner rather than later. They will also prove useful in helping the group take a more offensive stance rather than a defensive one, thus enabling IT to drive the growth and efficiency within your business without hampering any other process.
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