If you recently joined a new company as a IT Leader, you should implement these five low-hanging fruits to get a flying start!
- 1) Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR), so the company can continue its core business no matter what happens.
- 2) An IT Asset Management System, to replace messy spreadsheets, save dozens of hours a week and thousands in lost/damaged devices - and get in full control of your IT assets.
- 3) A Patch Management System, to ensure all devices connected to the company network are running the latest, patched versions with the latest security updates.
- 4) A Cloud Cost Management System, so you can keep all IT costs under control and have them centralized in one dashboard.
- 5) A Helpdesk Ticketing System, to centralize all IT support requests, build statistics and improve your response times.
1) Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR)
BCDR is a set of processes that helps companies recover from a potential disaster and continue business operations.
Business Continuity is about creating policies and routines that ensure business activity can continue like normal during and after a disaster has occurred.
This means implementing fallbacks to ensure that the core business won't be affected if the office WiFi goes down, a storage server fails or the email service becomes unavailable.
To get started on your BC plan, you can use a template like this one by Smartsheet.
Disaster Recovery is about making routines for how to recover from a disaster that's already occurred.
This involves outlining how you'll restore servers, devices, and internal networks, and setting up backups on-site, off-site and in the cloud - that you regularly test and verify the integrity of.
Here's a great Disaster Recovery template by Smartsheet that you can use.
2) IT Asset Management (ITAM)
ITAM is the tracking and management of a company's IT assets, to ensure that every asset is accounted for, properly used, and maintained through its lifecycle.
A lot of companies still use spreadsheets to manage their IT assets, however, there are several downsides to that:
- It's super easy to lose track of who has what, or where things are.
- No one knows when warranties are expiring.
- No one knows when audits are due.
- It's difficult to know how much inventory is available.
- It's really time-consuming to manage multiple spreadsheets.
That's why it's important to implement a proper IT Asset Management software that lets your team answer questions like this in a few minutes, not a few hours:
- "How many assets does Emily have at the moment?"
- "When does the warranty of John's laptop expire?"
- "When was the last time Andrew's laptop was in for an audit?"
- "How many iPhones do we have left in stock?"
When replacing spreadsheets with IT Asset Management software like BlueTally, companies save an average of ~7 hours a week and thousands of lost/damaged equipment a year.
BlueTally also integrates with Intune, Active Directory, Okta, Teams, Slack, and OneLogin, and has full SSO and SCIM support - and a powerful API.
Check out the live demo app to see how it could look for your company!
3) Patch Management
Patch Management is about identifying and installing the latest software versions that fix bugs or security holes.
This means that you need to stay updated on all available patches for all the devices that your company has, and ensure the latest versions won't break any existing integrations with other systems.
As you can imagine, this is a rather daunting and time-consuming task, which is why several systems do this job automatically - by scanning for missing patches, and installing and testing them.
Check out Capterra's list of the best Patch Management Systems to find one that works great for the type of devices and software that your company is using.
4) Cloud Cost Management
Cloud Cost Management lets companies understand and manage the costs associated with all their IT tools, to maximize efficiency and reduce waste.
As cloud infrastructure becomes more complex, the actual costs become more opaque and difficult to track, and it's easy for costs to spiral out of control.
That's why it's important to keep track of and manage all cloud costs to make the most out of your company's infrastructure and remove unnecessary spending.
Here are the two key strategies for CCM:
- Right-sizing: Make sure the plans and instances you're using are the right fit for your needs.
- Scaling and scheduling: Only auto-scale up resources when you need them, and schedule non-essential resources to be shut down on weekends, nights, etc.
Here is Capterra's list of the best Cloud Cost Management Systems out there.
5) Helpdesk Ticketing
A Helpdesk Ticketing System lets you centralize all your IT support requests from multiple channels into one system.
Even though you get most of your IT support requests through email, there are probably still some who prefer calling you, or walking up to you - ticketing systems make it possible to manage all these requests in one place.
Implementing ticketing also lets you track each request's progress correctly, and lets you keep a pulse on your team's efficiency. You can also filter tickets based on their priority (such as critical bug reports vs feature requests) and how long they've been open.
There's a sea of helpdesk ticketing systems out there, some are self-hosed and others cloud-based. In general, it's always wise to go for the cloud option in these cases, as the time you'll spend setting up, hosting, and managing the self-hosted instance will certainly be more expensive than paying a monthly subscription fee for a cloud-based app.
Check out G2's list of the best Helpdesk Ticketing Systems.
