It’s always great for a business to undergo a growth period. However, it can also be daunting. Businesses must ensure that their operations can manage additional demands. Likewise, if a business’s IT infrastructure isn’t optimized for business upscaling, this time for transition can be more demanding. 

As such, optimizing IT infrastructure is necessary for business growth. The reason is that you can avoid the hassle of configuring servers and buying new equipment each time you broaden your services, like using a hybrid cloud solution instead of traditional computing to assist in times of upscaling. 

There are other benefits to optimizing your business’ IT infrastructure. A better IT infrastructure reduces downtime, maximizes revenue, strengthens networks, and enhances productivity. 

Overall, here are the steps to optimize your IT infrastructure for business growth. 

1. Automating IT Infrastructure

Automation is one of the most effortless ways to optimize your IT infrastructure. This is because it generally minimizes human error and manual labour and enhances the capacity of work. This is vital as you move toward expanding the network capabilities of your organization to prepare for business growth without significantly increasing the budget. 

Automation can become more vital in complicated IT systems; where it can streamline processes that would in any other way necessitate manual intervention. Here, you should focus on core functions such as data allocation, system monitoring, root-cause analysis, storage and network, and backups. 

Likewise, you can also refer to your system audit to assess areas in which bottlenecks happen, where processes necessitate IT intervention, and where end-user actions steer processes. Every case like this may be a nominee for automation. 

Automation can assist you in accelerating your IT operations. However, a flawed IT process can still end poorly even if done without human mistakes. As such, audit the IT processes for relevance, quality, and efficiency before applying automation. 

Overall, find help regarding IT infrastructure optimization by hiring IT services companies online. You can also get more information when you visit Tenecom, a top Toronto IT services firm and others like it. 

2. Audit And Evaluate

One of the initial steps to optimize your IT infrastructure is to evaluate your IT assets and be aware of how they’re being utilized in your business organization. Businesses sometimes buy software programs or applications that are later abandoned or those that are the same as the ones they already use. As an outcome, they’re possibly spending cash on a lot of licensing fees for services that aren’t being used or aren’t needed. So, organizations must undertake infrastructure visibility to know how their IT spendings work for their organization. 

To start, the ideal approach to obtain visibility is to audit and keep tabs on all devices, apps, and software employed and know which individuals can access them. 

As there’ll be changes in roles and employees resigning from your business, you need to make sure that permissions are adjusted accordingly. Spending time reviewing your IT assets properly can assist you in maintaining proper security in your organization; ensuring you’re making the most out of your IT revenue. 

3. Choose Trusted Vendors

You must select reliable hardware, SaaS, and software vendors to build a solid IT infrastructure for your organization. This step is crucial to the success of your IT infrastructure and business organization. 

Before deciding on having a long-term agreement with providers, it’s good to have a trial of the product or service to see if it’s suited to your organization. This is also ideal to know how the service provider will react when some issues occur. Will it act as soon as possible? Is it going to ask for extra fees to provide minimal assistance? Will it be available around the clock?  

Likewise, you can conduct vendor risk management to ensure that you can trust the chosen vendor or provider. Overall, you can save more cash in the coming years with great products and IT services. Turn to Prevalent’s VRM guide for tips on selecting the third party that’s right for your business.

4. Constant Maintenance 

Buying new IT equipment is excellent, but only when your business’ present equipment has reached its end. The amount spent on buying new IT devices and software may be more expensive than the cost of prolonging the expected life cycle of the older equipment.  

As such, regularly set out proper maintenance to ensure that your software and devices run correctly while prolonging their life expectancy. 

Likewise, an IT infrastructure maintenance plan involves the following: 

  • Server Maintenance 
  • Desktop Maintenance 
  • Backup Maintenance
  • Security Maintenance 

Note that a good maintenance plan set out along with having all your components in their latest version will make finding and fixing bugs less complicated. Furthermore, this type of maintenance can assist in reducing the chance of more significant problems in the future. 

Final Thoughts

Having an optimized IT infrastructure can be great for your business growth. It helps to upscale your business efficiently; avoiding the downtime that could stem from buying new technologies or configuring servers.

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Samantha is an HR practitioner who has worked with several companies to help them improve their HR practices. Samantha has gained decades of experience in handling all HR facets that include managerial relations, labour relations, training and development, recruitment, and compensation and benefits.

When Samantha is not busy at work, she writes articles about the importance of effective HR practices and why startups should always prioritize this area of the business.