When was your last technology audit? If your answer is any combination of what’s that, I don’t know and a while ago, keep reading. When businesses don’t give their technology the time and attention it needs, things go wrong. It might happen slowly at first with applications loading slower than they used to or workstations taking an extra minute to boot up, but over time small issues add up to big problems that leave your data, your operating system and your network infrastructure vulnerable… and your business at risk. Wondering where to get started? It’s with an information technology (IT) audit.

What Is an IT Audit?

Undergoing an IT audit provides businesses with an honest, third-party assessment of their current technology landscape. They’re especially helpful for business owners and non-technical stakeholders to gain a clear visual of their business technology.

Our IT audit is called the Marco Technology Assessment. It’s a thorough, all-encompassing assessment specifically designed to help business owners optimize their technology, solve security weak points, keep up with industry best practices and mitigate risk. I’ll share some examples below, but know that once your business undergoes the Marco Technology Assessment, you’ll know:

1. The current state of your business technology
2. Any known risks associated with your current technology
3. The business impact of each risk
4. Recommendations for mitigation

Here’s how it works. By using a combination of software and an onsite technician, we collect information relevant to your current business technology environment. We then use this data to compare your current technology landscape against industry best practices and assess twelve specific areas in terms of risk. These twelve areas include: server infrastructure, network infrastructure, power and environment, security, firewall, email systems, Internet infrastructure, file systems, applications, wireless infrastructure, workstations and backup and disaster recovery.

After the assessment, these areas will be ranked in terms of risk and identified as either high priority, medium priority, meets best practices or not monitored. Here’s an example of what those same twelve areas can look like after the Marco Technology Assessment is complete:

Next, any area identified as either high or medium priority is outlined to detail what concerns are associated with that area, the impact on your business and our recommendations to bring the area to meet best practices. And because the Marco Technology Assessment was developed for non-technical individuals, these concerns, impacts and recommendations are outlined in a non-technical, user-friendly manner.

Here’s an example of a high-priority server infrastructure assessment:

So, if we look at the second server infrastructure concern, you see that this business is running on a single server, which means they lack server redundancy. This is a risk for the business because within a single server environment, all business productivity will be unavailable in the event of server failure. To alleviate this risk, we recommend deploying a second physical server along with virtualization software. An alternative solution would be to implement a disaster recovery device capable of running critical servers in an outage -- this is how accessible we make understanding business technology when you choose Marco to handle your IT audit. 

Want to know the best part? The findings of your IT audit will be presented to you by a certified systems consultant who is capable of answering any questions you may have. Plus, the presentation includes a quote for each high-risk and medium-risk area, so key stakeholders will also have a clear understanding of what type of investment it would take to bring their business technology to meet best practices. With the way we’ve built the Marco Technology Assessment, it’s well worth your time. Get started with your own technology audit by clicking below.