Internally Auditing Your Business IT Systems

IT systems are complex, and they can get even more complex over time. Think of this as an email inbox. Over time, an email inbox fills up with spam, contacts you have corresponded to, unread and sent emails, and even particular settings that you might find useful at the time. When this is an apparent part of your daily professional life, it’s easy to keep on top of everything. But take a break from this inbox for six months, return to it, and you’ll likely be confused with just how you may have set things up before, or the overwhelming complexity of your communications.

This is why internal auditing your business IT systems can often be quite a difficult process should you begrudge it. Thankfully, it is possible to take that look at it after some time and piece by piece uncovering the issues, and apply more accountability to how this is managed. This can be especially important as you gather everything together before moving to a new IT setup or when updating your old systems.

Error Reports

Looking over your old error report logs and seeing how they have been attended to is important. It can show you if affirmative or discretionary action has been taken to override or solve the issue. Sometimes, this can show you if bad practice or worse, negligent behavior has taken place. It can also help you assess how future issues might have taken place thanks to the root of a previous one. When you keep a close eye on your error reporting, everything from the user experience of your staff, the security they might have needed, or a range of other implements becomes much more viable to consider, and can have a real impact on your business development. On top of this, accountability becomes near-impossible to ignore when considering who said issues were attributed to, and how they handled it.

The Need To Upgrade

It can sometimes be that a careful internal audit shows that your loading times are unacceptable, your security is flawed, or that your software is no longer compatible with the industry-standard updates you should be using to stay competitive. This means that using a CRM consultant to help advise you regarding your best strategy can be a real breath of fresh air in this direction. If you hope to stay active and adaptable as a business, you need to ensure your software systems are also.

Development

Developing a better standard of future practice comes from auditing and seeing how the situation is playing out right now. Viewing old practices such as error reporting, how locked out users might be granted access to a system, what your cloud functionalities are and if they’ve been working to help you or not. This can help you assess the best practice going forward, the services to use or avoid, and how compatibility is working now, or might work in the future. This way, you get the clearest possible picture of the future IT decisions you will make.

With these tips, we hope you can better internally audit your IT systems.