Have a romantic dinner for two planned? Box of chocolates and flowers ready? Maybe a jumbo-sized stuffed bear holding a heart? If you don’t have anything set up with your significant other for valentine’s day, you might be in trouble.
The same can be said for your IT department. If you don’t take the time to manage your IT architecture and anticipate its needs, it’s only a matter of time before it starts to break down. Here are a few tips to show your IT department some love this valentine’s day and beyond.
Protect your heart
You hear about it all the time – an organisation encounters a data breach, leaving enterprise data and personal information vulnerable to being stolen and misused. Protect your most valuable assets this valentine’s day by implementing a foolproof IT asset management strategy designed to keep your company’s software licenses up-to-date and secure.
> See also: From data centre to trading floor – how KVM can be used to secure finance industry assets
By eliminating outdated software, you can protect your organisation from the risk of hosting undetected security vulnerabilities, which hackers are quick to identify and exploit. You may be blinded by love, but you can rest assured knowing your enterprise won’t be blinded from an attack.
Get to know your IT assets
It’s good to be picky about what you look for, but in IT it’s important to value everything. Is your enterprise, and heart, an open book that’s in the right place? According to Gartner, companies waste 25% of their IT budget from software investments that aren’t being used.
That’s a big check that you don’t want to pick up. The use of IT asset management can help decipher what assets are in an IT department and use it to optimise IT budgets that can be used for other initiatives. Just as dating can be expensive, so can an underutilised IT department. Who doesn’t want more cash to spend on fun activities?
> See also: IT asset managers and CIOs – working together to tackle 'shadow IT'
Value the right information
Listening to your significant other, or in this case – viewing what’s in your enterprise architecture – is imperative to creating a good foundation that your company can build upon.
The use of actionable data and information can optimise the connected set of enterprise portfolios – including business architecture, applications, technology and investments – to help set goals and business strategies.
Knowing what needs to be valued and worked on helps you get an overall view of your enterprise architecture so you’re not left guessing on what its needs are.
Sourced from Walker White, President, BDNA
