How a Technology Assessment Can Help Your Business Thrive
Are you sure your technology practices and operations meet industry standards and are optimized for your business needs? Are you positive your technology systems and operations are fully compliant with government, organization, and industry requirements? The best way to ensure your business technology is reaching its full potential is to have an independent, third party technology assessment done—a team of professionals will discuss the goals and needs of your business, evaluate your business’s current technology setup and practices compared to those goals and needs, then make recommendations for fixes and improvements. Here are some of the benefits a technology assessment can offer:
Ensures business technology is aligned with business needs while keeping up with industry standards
Ensures procedures, practices, and policies are aligned with industry best practices
Suggests necessary remedial action to stay compliant with industry, organization, and government regulations
Helps inform long-term strategic planning efforts
Gives organizations a chance to benchmark how they are handling IT systems, operations, and security challenges compared to their peers
Business Technology
Standards in technology change so fast, staying current with trends and advancing industry standards can feel impossible. Don’t worry, IT professionals, like the team at SKB Cyber, can help keep track of the trends for you!
The team of experts at SKB Cyber can view the current technology being used in your business and make recommendations for upgrades, changes, and fixes, based on the business’s goals and needs. If a piece of equipment or a business tool doesn’t need to be upgraded immediately, but should be soon, the consultant can also advise on when the change should be implemented and product options moving forward. An assessment can also help catch any security concerns, helping your business mitigate security risks going forward.
Looking for a full restructure of your network, but don’t know where to start? Or do you need help setting up a network for your new business? A technology assessment can help here, too. By working to understand the goals of your business, the SKB Cyber consulting team can recommend a plan for the environment based on the needs of the business. Expert help can make the process of building an environment easy and seamless, making sure your business technology is ready for success!
Technology Procedures, Practices, and Policies
Technology procedures, practices, and policies are just as important as the technology itself. To get the most out of business technology, policies and procedures need to align with industry best practices, standards, and compliance frameworks, as well as the goals of the individual organization. During a technology assessment, SKB Cyber’s team can review current policies and procedures, create those that are missing, and advise on changes to make.
Often, feedback on policies, procedures, and the technology being used comes directly from users. By involving users in the process, the consultants can recommend a plan of action that fills the needs of the business, boosts user satisfaction, and removes as many hurdles to productivity as possible. Interviews with key stakeholders and IT professionals in the organization are used in addition to scans and other discovery methods to construct recommendations.
The team’s knowledge of technology frameworks, cybersecurity best practices, and the organization are key here, too. Missing policies or having faulty procedures can put your business’s sensitive information at risk, which can turn into an exorbitantly expensive mistake. In addition to putting information and systems at risk, having policies and procedures that do not align with your business goals and priorities can keep your business from thriving at its fullest potential. Proper policies and procedures can allow daily processes to move more smoothly and allow employees to be more efficient in their work.
Staying Compliant
Regulatory compliance frameworks for technology change regularly and can be difficult to understand and adhere to. Updates to frameworks, freshly implemented policies and regulations, and new company requirements further complicate the process. Staying compliant with legal requirements is especially important in heavily regulated industries like healthcare and banking. Failing to meet requirements can lead to costly fines and other legal action, in addition to harming your business reputation and losing customer trust.
An assessment is a useful step in ensuring your business is staying compliant with evolving requirements. Following technology and information security frameworks like ISO/IEC 27001 and NIST is necessary to ensure your business technology is secure and policies reflect your business’s intention to keep sensitive information safe, even in industries that are not heavily regulated.
SKB Cyber serves in several heavily regulated industries. Our team is well versed in the standards and requirements for these industries and can ensure your business is compliant with those regulations.
Strategic Planning
An assessment gives decision makers an opportunity to understand the cost and benefits of improving technology, as well as the costs and benefits of choosing not to act on recommendations. After discussing the recommended course of action, you, the stakeholder, can decide what is best for your business based on the clear and accurate information provided by an IT expert. An assessment allows decision makers to move forward being fully informed of the current state of the business’s technology, actions that need to be taken, the urgency of those actions, and options for how to remediate issues moving forward.
Policies, procedures, user training, and the technology itself need to work in tandem to get the most out of a business tech environment. Having even one lacking area can dampen productivity and put your business’s sensitive information and systems at risk. Data breaches are costly: the average total cost of a data breach is $4.88M, with $2.8M of that cost coming from post-breach responses, lost business, and operational downtime (IBM, Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024). In heavily regulated industries, breaches can come with additional penalties, fines, and legal fees, making the cost of a breach even heftier.
Beyond the cost of data breaches, poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9M per year (Gartner, How to Improve Your Data Quality). Gartner describes data quality as how accessible and applicable data is for use in a business’s priority cases. According to Slingshot’s 2023 Digital Work Trends Report, 65% of surveyed employees described not having all necessary information to perform their tasks as having a negative impact on productivity. An assessment can help businesses avoid these costs and show decision makers how to use technology to enhance productivity rather than hurt it.
For more information about SKB Cyber’s Technology Systems and Operations Assessment Services, visit https://www.skbcyber.com/tech-systems-ops-assessment
Ready for a technology assessment? We’ve got your back! Contact us at SKBInfo@skbcyber.com for a free consultation today!