An inefficient IT environment can lead to your staff productivity. Downtime is the result of an IT crash, and affects productivity because you can’t get on with helping your clients.
To speed up your IT system and minimise downtime, you need to improve the efficiency of your IT environment.
It’s important to understand what causes an inefficient IT environment, so you can implement changes to improve it.
Since IT now affects everything you do within your organisation, it’s important to address problem areas proactively.
Here are six most common ways you can increase IT efficiency.
1. Upgrade hardware and infrastructure
One of the most common reasons your IT systems fail is performance issues due to existing infrastructure. Therefore, you need to ensure you’re being proactive about maintenance, monitoring for faults, and have appropriate procedures in place to handle equipment malfunctions and power outages.
To reduce this problem and keep your system speedy, I recommend buying from big-name vendors, as they tend to be of a higher quality for business use. Think brands like Dells, IBM, and HP. Not only are they thoroughly tested, they also come with a warranty so if anything does happen, you’re not left in the dark with a big replacement fee.
Here are some thoughts from Jason Neville, R&G Technologies General Manager.
‘It’s not so much the manufacturing of the equipment that is significantly different; it’s more because the testing branded products have been through is of a much higher grade. So as a small to medium business, using branded hardware means you’re less likely to have problems in the future.’
2. Be smart about configuration
If your computer, servers and software haven't been configured correctly, your systems may perform poorly. Often times, in the early stages you won’t notice anything is wrong. However, after a while poor configuration can lead to unnecessary complexity in your IT environment, causing inefficiencies and higher support costs.
According to Neville,
‘We’ve seen this come up with businesses that are running antivirus software and running some other third-party solution on the one system. Since the third-party software is overlaid on top of the original solution, you’re creating an environment with untested combinations. This always has the potential to cause IT crashes’ - Neville.
To avoid this situation, you must plan for the future. Work with your internal IT guy or external provider to create an IT environment which employs best practice methodologies, with room for growth and change. Educate your staff on the perils of changing settings, or limit their access to administrative functions. Always implement your IT systems with a clear picture of where you expect your business to be in a few years.
3. Improve Redundancy within your IT Environment
Redundancy relates to the duplication of a component to increase reliability of your systems in the event of failure. When you don’t have redundancy, you don’t have a fail-safe if your systems crash.
Jason Neville shares some thoughts;
‘Customers coming from other IT providers often don’t have something called RAID. RAID is a term used for having multiple hard drives used to store your data, where those hard drives are essentially paired to provide a level of redundancy or mirroring.’ - Neville
Certain types of RAID ensure that if a hard drive fails, anorther hard drive mirroring your systems allow you to continue working without interruption. No equipment is immune to failure, so it’s a good idea to have redundant systems in case your primary systems fail.
There are often multiple levels of redundancy which can be employed to improve the IT environment. Perform a risk management assessment to determine where the greatest risks that can be mitigated lie.
Related: 3 step guide to choosing a backup solution
4. Upgrade IT systems as your requirements change
Your IT systems can become more unreliable as your organisation growsand your requirements change. Instead of supporting 10 users, you now face the challenge of supporting 30 users with the same infrastructure. The growth puts extra stress on your systems and can cause your systems to perform poorly, leading to reduced productivity or downtime.
A common misconception is that IT equipment gets slower with age, but what really happens is that an organisation’s requirements change over time and there is no reinvestment in IT equipment.
For example, a server is the main piece of equipment in your IT system. It will continue to operate and work well for you if your requirements, traffic and amount of users remain consistent. However, few businesses are just stagnant, they’re either growingor they’re shrinking. When too many users pile onto an existing server, the strain becomes too muchand your IT systems can’t handle it, slowing down or crashing.
To overcome this, you need to keep IT at the forefront of your business planning and upgrade infrastructure when needed. Unfortunately, lots of organisations still think of IT as an afterthought, instead of including it in all important organisational decisions.
Think about how much your team relies on IT. Can you really afford to neglect its importance and not upgrade it as your grow? Jason Neville explains why planning ahead is the best solution.
Planning ahead is the best solution. Make sure that when you do make the investment in your infrastructure, your anticipating what changes are likey to occur in the server's lifetime, which is commonly three to five years.
Where possible, incorporate a little strategic planning in your IT, ensuring nothing important has been forgotten or left behind. We aim to challenge our clients and to be the person on your shoulder saying; hey guys, the system is getting old, I know it was great when you first bought it, but when you move the goalposts your infrastructure needs to move too.
Related: How to tell what is cuasing your slow IT system
5. Standardise to streamline performance
To streamline the performance of your network, you need to set up a standard operating environment. A Standard Operating Environment (SOE) is a standard implementation of operating systems and associated software that is enforced on your network. This gives your users a consistent experience, and limits problems with different software products and versions being run all over the network.
Additionally, a SOE restricts users from installing potentially harmful software. If someone does need to install a particularl piece of software, you can set it up so they need permission. Your IT team can then carefully screen the software and eliminate the potential threat.
6. Proactive Maintenance
The last problem to look out for is a lack of maintenance. IT systems have a tendency to clog up and slow down over time. Most IT environments go through massive data changes, upgrades and get their configuration settings manipulated often. This constant process of ‘patching’ vulnerabilities needs to be maintained, as well as ensuring all software is up to date.
Proactive maintenance by your IT provider ensures that your IT environment runs smoothly. Keeping up to date with Windows will keep the system clean from bugs and security glitches. If you start missing updates you put your whole system at risk of potentially harmful viruses and glitches that can cause poor performance.
‘You have updates and maintenance that needs to be performed. These are the updates you’ll receive directly from Windows for example. Most of the time it’s about removing bugs or software security glitches within the IT environment’ - Neville.
Speed Up IT and Stop Crashes
Slow computers and crashes are the result of an inefficient IT system. Use the six solutions provided in this chapter to proactively prevent future problems. Make sure your internal IT team is up to speed with these reasons and have him download this IT system checklist.
Alternatively, hire an external IT provider that can give your IT system a full audit and find any inefficient areas.