An IT plan shows the trajectory of your company’s IT infrastructure, starting with assessing basic needs and building upon those needs to have a comprehensive roadmap and plan of action for your IT projects and investments. This way, you have a straightforward strategy in line with your budget and business goals to guide your team, whether you hire in-house experts or outsource.
This guide will help you create a comprehensive IT plan that can help you meet your tech needs for increased efficiency and alignment with your customers’ expectations.
To start building your IT plan, you need to take stock of what is going on in your IT department. During this phase, you’ll either bring in technology consulting services or allocate time for your internal IT person to do a full assessment of your IT infrastructure. Even when on a budget, there can be a benefit to an outside opinion, particularly if you have a small IT team or need expert advice in one core area outside your standard IT competency.
Note that this assessment should be ongoing as things update and change.
Once you have an overview of your current IT standing and configuration, ideally, you should define your business objectives and how IT can fit into and proactively support your overall business goals — rather than simply reacting when things break down.
Using your assessment of the existing resources, you and your team should determine the tactical activity and estimated project cost. Ensure you have allocated resources to tackle your plan in a reasonable timeframe, whether utilising your internal IT team or technology consulting services.
Your plan needs to include these three key components: security enhancements, backup/disaster recovery, and maintenance and support. Prioritise these three areas to get the things you need first, and you can budget for additional improvements down the road. The following sections will go into more detail on why these areas are essential for your business.
1. Security enhancements
The first thing to tackle is any security issues or risks identified in the assessment stage. You should:
-
-
- Analyse your hardware and onsite firewalls.
- Web filter to prevent malicious or inappropriate websites from being accessed on your network.
- Evaluate Gateway AV or antivirus protection at the network level.
When evaluating existing security risks, you mustn’t ignore the human element: phishing, using unsecured personal devices for secure work, and other human mistakes can lead to security vulnerabilities for your business. Track devices your employees are using and ensure your staff receives user security training to build awareness around potential online threats. Furthermore, you want to be careful with the applications employees use on their devices to ensure they are secure.
Once you have a solid foundation for security, you can plan gradual enhancements to ensure your company’s safety down the road. Your company can look into things like VPN to bring remote workers into your secure network, an APT blocker to protect your devices from ransomware, and a web application firewall to control how web applications interact with your network.
2. Backup and disaster recovery
After you build the plan for cybersecurity and ongoing management of your IT systems, you can focus on developing your backup and recovery processes. In other words, you create a framework for a straightforward, fast response to get things back online swiftly after an incident.
Depending on your industry, your business may have additional security and compliance requirements to factor into your security plan, such as data residency, systems isolation, or PIPEDA—which should all have a place in your overall IT plan.
To move your backup and disaster recovery forward, you can include future initiatives and goals to work towards. This includes areas like minimising security risks, optimising business processes for virtual work for both emergency and convenience and putting systems in place to decrease downtime when issues arise.
3. Maintenance and support
After you put your IT plan in action, you will need to set up an ongoing support system to provide maintenance when things go wrong and support when you or your employees need help actualising your IT goals. It should include the continuous assessment of your IT systems, necessary for improving and building on your IT plan over time.
Much of the maintenance and support can be done internally, like having some IT personnel on staff to help evaluate your IT plans and provide ongoing support via helpdesk to your users. You should budget for the right employees to keep your IT running as a business. Still, you also need to budget for the physical, technological infrastructure, such as servers, storage, and cloud applications that you may want to invest in down the line.
There are also some indicators that you may need to bring in more technology experts for ongoing maintenance and support:
-
-
- You are having trouble meeting your business’ needs with the current IT staff
- You need an expert to help develop a more robust IT plan going forward and to manage security risks
- You need your IT department to focus more on your core business than help desk and maintenance issues
- You need IT support outside of regular business hours or 24/7 support, whether onsite or remote
- You do not need much onsite support but could benefit from more robust remote support
If these apply to your business, you should consider developing more technical support for your business. It can be hiring more members for your IT team or setting up a relationship with technology consultant services. What type of support you bring in depends on the coverage you need since technology consultant services often cost less for 24/7 support than hiring employees to cover challenging shifts.
