At some point in a successful small business’ lifetime, it will need to think about scaling IT to match growth. This can either be a planned-for event that smoothly unfolds over time or a challenge that the business must invest productive time, effort, and money into. Ideally, your company will save its time and resources to focus on your clients and products while the IT department handles IT scaling as it needs to happen, but how can a business set itself up for success? Here are three best practices that will help make any IT scaling your business needs an easier process for your staff!
Infrastructure Plus Skills
Scaling IT to match the growth in employee numbers and machines used by the company requires two things: that your IT infrastructure can accommodate a boost in numbers and that your IT staff has the knowledge and skills to scale up company hardware. Your staff should be familiar with how to rollout your security platforms to accommodate hundreds of new machines, and the decision makers should know which security tools won’t easily support IT scaling and need to be replaced. Your team should remain flexible in finding solutions to hiccups in the scaling process, and small businesses can consider bringing in an IT consultant when gaps in skill need to be filled.
Efficient Security Response
As a company grows and IT scaling begins, it is critical that response times to security threats do not increase. A business can hire additional IT staff or outsource their IT needs to match the increase in users so that no cybersecurity threats go unaddressed. In addition to a strong IT staff, IT scaling should be thought of when buying security tools. A company will want cybersecurity solutions that integrate and communicate easily with each other while providing contextual information on events. This will keep the information your IT staff needs in one place, so they aren’t chasing it down to properly investigate a threat while you are scaling IT needs to match growth.
Start Scaling IT Early
The most important factor for scaling IT cybersecurity infrastructure is planning. As you work with your MSP to choose cybersecurity tools, you should ask how that solution scales when a company grows from 10 to 100 people. A strong multifactor authenticator, for example, will allow your IT staff to simply enroll new employees as they get onboarded into your current system. This will increase the rate you pay for the service because it’s based on the number of users enrolled, but the process should be as simple as enrolling a new employee when they start and seeing a predictable increase in your cost for the service.
Summary
Scaling IT will look different for each company because of their unique IT environment, but any company with an aim of growth will need to expand their cybersecurity network. These best practices will help make that process easier and avoid costly mistakes in the long run, but scaling your cybersecurity infrastructure should be a project you get as much help as you need for. Our team here at Robinett Consulting wants to use our knowledge and expertise to help ease the growth process for you, so if you need knowledge that fills the gaps in your IT staff’s skills or consulting advice on a large project, then we want to be your partner.
