An IT audit is an essential aspect of successful and efficient IT management. Auditing all of your business technology including routers, switches, firewalls servers, storage, computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones means that you have definitive snapshot of your IT estate at any one time.
However, IT auditing is often ‘overlooked’, especially in smaller and expanding businesses. Frequently, this arises from a question of resource. Often, when a business has no dedicated in-house IT support personnel, the administrative side of IT is low down the list of priorities.
At a hardware level, the audit provides a list of inventory. Recording the make, model, exact hardware specification and the date of purchase of each device, makes a wide variety of administrative tasks a lot easier, including:
Taking the next step and auditing the software versioning of each computer including operating systems, utilities (such as anti-virus) and patches makes it much easier to manage the IT estate in terms of productivity and performance. Benefits include:
To be most effective IT auditing needs to be undertaken on a regular basis. Ideally, anytime there is a change to the infrastructure, server-side or on the user device side the change should be recorded for each device.
Spreadsheets and databases can be easily and quickly set up to record and manage audit data. There is also a multitude of auditing software solutions available that save a lot of time and require a lot less effort when compared to a manual audit process.
If you need help with any aspect of auditing IT hardware and software technology in your business, please contact us and we’ll be glad to see if we can help. Simply fill in the form on the right or call us on 01844 293 330.
Image care of Stuart Miles at freedigitalphotos.net
For more than 20 years, Paralogic has been working with small and medium sized businesses, providing outstanding IT support that they can rely on. We’re thrilled, therefore, to be named among the best MSPs in…
Read MoreThe European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most significant shake up of information security for many years. Despite the toughening of rules and the harsh treatment of companies by regulators and the…
Read More