A Warm Fuzzy Feeling

March 2009

In uncertain times there are things that you want to feel certain of. If your IT systems underpin your business activities then there’s no better time for a review.

Start by looking at your realigned key business objectives. Your IT has to fall in with line to support your business needs not the other way around. Do you have a lot of mobile workers, home workers, or is your workforce office based? Are you reliant on key applications or multiple applications, perhaps needs differ across departments.

If you have a mobile workforce, or a lot of home workers, review if they can connect securely to your network. Being able to facilitate remote system access to a number of workers can add huge value to your business. As an employer you can accommodate home working and flexible working and benefit from lower overheads.  Research shows that in these situations employees are likely to be more diligent and work additional hours than contracted. During February’s snow storms over 6 million workers stayed off work; just imagine if they had the ability to work from home.

Your servers, are they old and struggling? Are they squeaking, do they fall over (by this I mean do they die frequently rather than become unbalanced). Can they last another year? I would say that if you are thinking along those lines, then it is time to renew now.  If a server is under-performing your workers are under-performing. On the flipside if you have high-end servers and are thinking you need another, are you looking carefully enough at the utilisation? Most high end servers are run at only 25% of their capacity. In this instance deploying a virtualised solution, rather than buying a new server, can quadruple the amount of processes you run on one server and at considerably lower costs.

Hardware - it should be cost efficient, eco-efficient and sustainable. I’m not advocating going out and buying the latest hardware just because the latest models have a better energy-efficiency rating, but you should plan for the future. For now, just look at what you have and how it is used. 

Does the receptionist have the latest, greatest model because their machine broke last? Is your graphic designer struggling on an old AppleMac G2. An assessment of application and processing demands and migration of desktops down the chain is a far more effective deployment strategy.

Laptops are great if you have mobile workers but if they are only taken home once a month then is it not cost effective. Fixed workstations with larger monitors deliver greater productivity.  Not only are these units are cheaper, especially if you have Thin Client PC’s, they are more easy to secure and less easy to steal. If you do have the misfortune to suffer a burglary then thieves always take the lightweight option. By all means have a pool laptop for shared use, as and when required.

With security in mind reviewing your internal policies would also pay dividends just now. It should be standard practice for all data to be stored on the server, where it is secure, current and backed up.  Thin Client computing is a fabulous technology that unobtrusively enforces this.

Antivirus is a must, is comes pre-installed in most machines these days, but is yours up-to-date. Have you downloaded the latest up-dates and software patches, are you as protected as you could be. The Conficker-C worm, a current, rather virulent threat, has infected over 15 million machines over the net so far. It can wipe out your workforce, giving the author the ability to control your desktops, servers, the full scope of which is still unknown. This can be inadvertently contracted by something as simple as a staff downloading an infected file. Many businesses are putting policies in place to restrict internet access to social networking and non-business sites during business hours, limiting access to lunch breaks.

These are perhaps considered as some of the more obvious aspects of an IT review. Obvious - absolutely. Effective - most certainly.