In the world of IT, assessment is a vital tool for understanding how your company’s technology systems are working. It can also help identify areas for improvement and optimize performance.
The best assessments are rooted in clear, concrete recommendations. Whether the final report is high-level or in-depth, it should give your team a solid roadmap for moving forward.
2. Conduct a Network Performance Review
This step examines the current infrastructure of a network to identify any potential issues. This could include equipment information, application types, IOS versions, topologies and circuits.
Effective network assessment tools automatically record all performance concerns and related details. This helps IT teams quickly assess problem areas that require closer monitoring or more in-depth examination. This saves time and resources.
Additionally, network assessment tools should provide a clear picture of a network’s health with intuitive dashboards and real-time visualizations. These features are helpful in identifying show-stopping performance issues, as well as determining optimal network architecture. ITarian’s comprehensive IT assessment now tool provides all these features at a very affordable price. Get a free trial now!
3. Conduct a Security Review
A security review is a method for actively monitoring information security levels to protect your firm’s most valuable data. This process involves creating security policies, detecting risks, and spotting security threats to IT systems.
It also includes determining the level of risk associated with each vulnerability/threat pair, which helps you prioritize your mitigation efforts. For example, risks that are both likely to happen and would have severe consequences would be mapped as high priority, while risks that are unlikely to happen but would have marginal consequences would be mapped as low priority.
You can perform a security assessment internally with the help of your IT team or outsource it to an independent third party assessor. A third-party assessment is more costly, but it can be helpful if a preliminary internal assessment shows grave security gaps.
4. Conduct a Compliance Review
When it comes to IT compliance, every chain is only as strong as its weakest link. A compliance review gives you the opportunity-and motivation-to upgrade your cybersecurity systems.
Start by determining the IT standards you need to stress-test with your assessment. This will depend on your industry, location, and the types of data you store in your IT systems. For example, PII (Personally Identifiable Information) includes any information that can identify a person, such as social security numbers or address data.
As you conduct your IT assessment, create a system for tracking any potential compliance deviations. This will help your team follow up and implement corrective actions, which will then be documented within the company’s existing corrective action program. This will ensure that your organization can quickly remediate any compliance violations uncovered during the assessment process.
5. Conduct a Business Impact Analysis
A BIA looks at what would happen if you lost critical business processes or systems and then defines recovery goals, timeframes, and resources. It also identifies application interdependencies so you can see how one failure could impact other processes.
Having clear objectives and value propositions at the beginning of the process is crucial to executive buy-in. This helps prevent the BIA becoming an unproductive exercise or something that gets done only because it’s required by IT governance.
It’s important to regularly review and update your BIA as you make changes in your organization. This can be a simple, annual review or a more frequent update as your business evolves. It’s important to understand how a new process will impact the organization so you can adjust your plan accordingly.
