Every year, businesses are losing $21.8 million due to downtime. This dreadful scenario is an outcome of the tendency of the IT departments to be reactive than proactive. Generally, they spend more time in solving the problems instead of trying to identify them before they cause disruption. This faultline especially lies with the small organizations who run short on the quality as well as the quantity of desired experts who are required to avert such downtimes. 

The situation becomes even bleaker as not all problems are immediately visible and tend to build up over a period of time. There is more than a possibility that this unpreparedness will put you on the brink of providing an inefficient and inconsistent service to your end users. That’s precisely where proactive IT Infrastructure assessment shines with paramount importance.

1) Identify Your Strengths And Weaknesses: 

The first and immediate benefit of IT Infrastructure assessment is it gives you a complete and realistic picture of your existing IT systems. Once equipped with it, you can pinpoint the strengths of your IT Infrastructure as well as the areas where improvements are needed. You can measure how well the network is managed, how good are the IT policies that govern your IT Infrastructure and how perfectly they are being implemented. Consequently, you would be in a better position to visualize and implement robust IT infrastructure.

2) Early Detection of Problems:

Through monitoring failure patterns and regular health checks of your infrastructure, IT Infrastructure assessment lets you identify any discrepancies within your systems and understand correlations. Note that without monitoring your systems, you cannot know if they are running out of capacity. You will find it out only when the issue has transformed into a bigger problem. Monitoring the systems takes disruptions like network congestion out of the equation much before they impact end users. This approach isn’t only more productive for end users, but it relieves the strain on the IT department. This can mark a paradigm shift, as you will be focusing on preventing outages rather than fighting fires.

3) Meeting Various Compliances:

Corporate governance is made up of two parts: recognizing the risks faced by the business with respect to software compliance and mitigating those risks before they get resulted in reputation damage and penalties.

IT Infrastructure assessment enables you to list out software systems that are no longer in use and need to be discarded. You can also take remediation measures by identifying software assets that do not talk with each other and finding possible cases of software overlap. 

4) Better Planning Of IT Expenditure:

An IT infrastructure assessment will accurately dot down the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for your IT resources including the cost of purchase, implementation, and maintenance. It is also helpful in deciding whether functions performed by your current set-up can be performed at a lower TCO. Moreover, you can get the most out of your IT Infrastructure by finalizing areas in which infrastructure resources need to be replaced to keep up the pace with the business demand. More importantly, it will let you deal with obsolescence in a phased manner that allows businesses to plan how they can best assign their resources. 

5) Reducing Business Disruptions:

With IT infrastructure assessment, you can find out old, fragile and risky legacy equipment from the IT Infrastructure that may be supporting the business. Based on this information, you can come up with a plan to replace or refactor the equipment to reduce business disruptions. As it weeds out many key vulnerabilities, it ensures higher availability of network resources and thereby reduces any disruption to the business.