Regardless of how your business’s administration is set up, you should be aware that anyone in a position of authority must have a basic understanding of how IT, and its related responsibilities, functions for your business. Here are four ways that you can learn more about how IT works within your organization.
1. Know Who to Contact for Support
As a leader within your organization, you need to lead by example. You should be aware of who to contact within your company for any IT-related issues, and this contact information should be shared with other employees within your organization. By cooperating with IT, your business can improve operations so that you don’t encounter a roadblock when it comes time to upgrade to more recent technology, or perform maintenance on critical hardware and software.
2. Working with Vendors
Dealing with vendors is part of doing business with technology. Your organization likely has several different vendors for your various hardware and software solutions. Knowing how to communicate with them is key to getting the most from your products. In other words, you should at least be privy to information concerning your organization’s relationship with its vendors.
3. Basic Security Best Practices
This is a part of business that all of your employees should be familiar with. Data security is one of the most crucial parts of running a business, and your team needs to understand this if you want to ensure maximum security. Examples of basic security best practices include the following:
- Employees should use long, complex passwords.
- Employees should use two-factor authentication.
- Employees should be able to identify potential online scams.
4. Managing Laptops and Mobile Devices
If your employees bring their own devices (BYOD) to the workplace for use on your company network, you have a responsibility to ensure that they’re following proper protocol. Do you have a BYOD policy? If not, you should consider setting one up. You need to have some sort of oversight in regards to what data is being used and accessed on what devices. The idea is to restrict the flow of data through permissions so that you can know how it’s being used, and to limit its exposure to threats.
This might seem like a lot to take in, but you don’t have anything to worry about. Most of these issues can be resolved simply by having an IT technician on-hand to consult in times of need. If you don’t have an in-house IT department, this might seem like an impossible task. Thankfully, Vision makes it easy for your business to keep your technology functioning properly and running without incident; all thanks to outsourced managed IT services.
Vision can handle the everyday management and maintenance of your IT systems, and act as a consultant, helping you make educated decisions about the future of your technology systems. For more information, give us a call at 248.349.6115.
