How to Optimize Your IT environment
Organizations have now shifted to working from home and we have put together a list on how to optimize your IT environment and cyber security.
Amid the urgency to shift to the cloud, a few important aspects of IT planning may have been overlooked. As a result of the move to the cloud, it is unlikely that a long-term plan has been developed in relation to data governance — the practice of managing, maintaining, and using enterprise data in a secure way.
At the beginning of the pandemic, it is understandable that companies did not place a high priority on data governance. Now, with companies reviewing their cloud strategies and contemplating the next steps for optimizing their cloud investments, to help maximize the value from the cloud, data governance plays a crucial role. In fact, this has become increasingly true because last year’s data was produced at an unexpected speed. As your IT infrastructure becomes cluttered with overwhelming amounts of unorganized data, the rapid creation of data can result in data sprawl, a staggering amount of unorganized data that becomes out of control.
To optimize your IT environment, organizations that are planning to migrate more workloads to the cloud or to consolidate their IT infrastructures in advance of mergers or acquisitions should seize this opportunity to fight digital inertia and improve the entire process. To maximize long-term success for companies, here are five key ways they should optimize their IT environments.
As a leading managed IT services Toronto, we can help your organizations achieve the following items.
Introducing Governance in the Organization
A data governance strategy will ensure that you remain in control of your data. Unfortunately, there are still many businesses that do not have a proper governance strategy in place yet. In some companies, the emphasis is on implementing technology that can help them meet compliance regulations and enable discovery within their systems; however, a focus on managing and managing data is not always the priority. The consequences of this, as well as the challenges governing data can quickly become out of control – for instance, rising costs related to data sprawl and the inconveniences faced by employees when they must chase down the information they need.
As a proactive way to resolve this issue, establish a plan for implementing a governance model and train internal IT teams to take care of the governance work. Ensure that your team is familiar with the technology tools available to them and the necessary reporting to be able to make decisions about what data to keep and how to manage access to it. By doing so, you will minimize the possibility of data sprawls.
Clean up the unnecessary data in the house
When you migrate data from on-premises to the cloud or from one cloud tenant to another, there is always an opportunity to clean things up at the same time. You should take advantage of the migration process to reevaluate what you have, and eliminate data you don’t need, when your company migrates workloads or consolidates IT resources.
If you have compliance rules and regulations in your company, you’ll have to consider what data you can remove, however, there’s still a good chance that you’ll be able to archive or delete some data. The services and technologies such as Microsoft Teams and its channels should be reviewed and evaluated. In the upcoming weeks, we’ll be talking about the importance of structuring SharePoint, Teams, and channels in a better way. You do not necessarily need to make all the data available to all users if your company’s compliance guidelines require that you retain a significant amount of data. You only need to make it available to those who need it.
As a leading managed IT services Toronto, we can assist in cleaning up your data.
Find a good lead for your project
The cost of hiring someone who is truly in charge of governance can be worth it in some cases. There’s a way to engage your company’s management team directly as part of the data governance process. The best way to measure the cost of technology resource allocation is to ask them to define the report and methodologies for calculating those costs.
Managing effectively is not just about using technology; it’s also about using technology in a proactive manner that can be controlled by a responsible leader. It will be incumbent on your company’s governance lead to enact change and ensure that any issues that surface are not only identified, but also addressed by the leadership team of your organization.
Investing in a governance champion doesn’t necessarily mean needing to hire a new employee. It could mean taking advantage of a third-party tech solution that monitors your systems and provides insights to help you make better decisions. Your champion should, at the end of the day, enable you to acquire data when you need it at the right time when you need it. Otherwise, using your data may have rendered it obsolete by the time you use it.
Create a Roadmap for Success
In the context of data governance, establishing best practices is not always an easy task. Most of the time, it is a lengthy process. Therefore, you might want to consider establishing a governance roadmap to inform the direction in which your company will go. Having the ability to accomplish small goals as well as map out strategic projects to drive accountabilities and organizational governance will help your company achieve its goals. Moreover, you can include a roadmap that outlines how the new cloud or technology solutions should be evaluated in relation to your corporate governance guidelines.
Your organization should have flexibility in both how it approaches solutions to technology problems and how it approaches its data management and management operations. You want to improve efficiency, cost management, and employee satisfaction at the end of the day, because that’s what you really want.
Any successful managed IT services in Toronto can assist you in future proofing your business.
Keep going, don’t stop
If you have accomplished getting your house in order, do not abandon your governance practices once you have done so. There is much more to corporate governance than solving a problem. It is about ongoing maintenance to ensure that your company is in control of data creation, access, and management. A regular assessment of your data is vital to ensuring that only the best, most accurate, and most relevant information is retained, and that outdated or unnecessary information is not accumulated over time.
In the excitement to move to the cloud, some companies may have overlooked the need for a long-term governance plan. Thankfully it’s never too late to introduce a governance model that will ensure long-term success. The amount of data most enterprises tend to generate is staggering, and because of this, they need to be proactive in making sure that they implement effective governance practices. If your organization does this, it will be able to leverage technology more efficiently, improve productivity, manage costs more effectively, and maximize the value of its IT resources.
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