What New Enterprise-Level Businesses Need to Change About Their IT Practices
Is your business growing? As you expand, you also need to adapt. The solutions and processes that worked for you as a smaller business may not work as an enterprise-level business, especially in terms of your IT practices. Enterprise IT solutions can help.
As your business scales, it becomes necessary to modify your IT infrastructure and IT processes. It’s likely that your business is going to be facing many new challenges, and it’s going to need improve upon many of its operations.
Here are a few areas in which you’ll likely have to update your IT practices.
Data Storage
Large companies generate exponentially more data than smaller ones do. Where is your company storing its data? Is the data secure? And could that data be restored if it was all lost? Data storage and management is rapidly becoming an issue for enterprise-level businesses, making a need for enterprise business solutions.
Data has to be properly categorized and maintained; otherwise it’s nigh impossible to find relevant files in the future: If the data isn’t properly managed, your terabytes upon terabytes of stored data are practically useless.
As a company finds its data inventory growing, it often loses track of its data backup processes. When data backups have become unwieldy, that’s when they’re at their most needed.
Compliance
The more prominent your business is, the more likely that you will be working with governmental entities, so it’s important to ensure that you’re in full compliance. For instance, it may have been easier to let regular patching lapse as a smaller company, but that is often a breach of compliance when working with Uncle Sam (or other governments).
Compliance measures can change from year to year, and it can be a full-time job just making sure that a business is up to code. Not only does compliance change based on government and non-government contracts, but compliance may also differ from industry to industry.
A lack of compliance can ultimately cost a business a significant amount in fines and penalties, along with losing business due to having to correct the issues. Compliance problems, if publicized, can also lead to a loss of faith.
International Regulations
As an enterprise, you likely have offices or customers around the world. To continue to interact with these customers, you have to abide by international regulations, such as the European Union’s GDPR.
New regulations are being introduced constantly, and they relate to many different countries. Given increasing consumer demands for security and privacy, it is likely that we will see new GDPR-level legislation and regulation in countries around the world. As an enterprise-level business, you will need to be aware of all relevant regulations, and must follow them to avoid expensive fines and penalties.
Communication, Accountability, Documentation
It may have been easy enough to manage projects and determine accountability via ad-hoc solutions when your business was smaller, but that’s a recipe for disaster with an enterprise. Consider cloud solutions that can get your business on the right page.
It’s important to have documentation for every aspect of your business as it grows, and to use this documentation as a method of fine-tuning your business processes moving forward. As new employees are brought on board and trained, your documentation will provide an invaluable method of ensuring consistency.
Documentation can further be used to support your company if it is ever audited or experiences a security breach. When security breaches occur, a business may need to defend itself in order to be covered by insurance. It may also need it to prove that you followed regulations, as discussed earlier.
Adopting New Technology
It’s important to plan ahead whenever adapting new technology. Changes to a company’s software infrastructure can have drastic impact on the company itself. Modern enterprise-level businesses have to be transparent about their change process, and usually must avoid change for the sake of change.
New technology comes with many hidden costs, related directly to training, support, and lost productivity. Yet a lack of new technology can make a business fall behind. New technologies have to be researched, analyzed, and audited – and a growing company may not always be able to support this in-depth research. An MSP can help.
Growing your company can be an exciting time, but also a stressful one. You may find you need enterprise IT solutions. Red River can help make the process painless with our expert IT solutions and consulting. Contact Red River today.
