How to Get the Most Out of Your Security Budget
Running a business isn’t cheap, which results in budgets becoming strained under their operational needs. A major contributor to this strain is often the security-focused line items. However, there are a few means and methods to getting the most out of your security budget.
1: Internships
Internships are an excellent opportunity to boost your IT security staff for a time, especially if you’re looking to add a few well-trained hires in the near future. Cooperating with nearby universities and colleges, and their computer science faculty members, can help you bring in talent that you can direct toward your security for a lower cost than a fresh new hire. Work with your Human Resources department to sort out the logistics, and you may find yourself with an effective security staff with customized training before very long; and, after you have seen that they are worth their salaries through the course of the program.
2: Internal Training
When it comes to maintaining your security, your employees are the ones who are in the trenches. They have to be able to identify potential threats and mitigate them effectively, or your business will left vulnerable. To accomplish this, your staff needs to be trained to understand and lean on the industry’s best practices as they go about their days.
Fortunately, there are plenty of resources available online that your staff can read (and watch) for little to no cost. There is plenty that can be learned from reading articles posted on websites, including this one. Encouraging your workforce to read materials like these can give them a basic understanding of what they need to do to keep the business safe. Of course, you can also hold training sessions for employees to practice what they would do, given a hypothetical scenario.
3: Free Tools (But with Caveats)
There are plenty of free resources out there to help you with your security. The biggest one: Google. Possibly the most important part of keeping your company secure is to understand what threats are out there and how they could negatively affect your company’s network security. Keeping up-to-date and informed will help you to make the adjustments to your security plans that you’ll need.
There are also plenty of free security tools available for download, but you should always have an IT professional check them out first, and ideally, implement them for you. Otherwise, you run the risk of willingly (if unknowingly) introducing malware into your network.
4: Automation
Automation has made great strides in recent years, which makes it an even better tool for businesses to leverage. However, it is not something that should be seen as a replacement for your existing security staff. Rather, they should work in tandem. With the rote, run-of-the-mill issues being handled by preconfigured processes, your employees can divert their attention to bigger matters that demand more focus.
5: Outsourcing
This is another excellent way to bring some extra value in for fewer costs, as outsourcing provides you with additional experts at your disposal for a predictable cost. By having your outsourced resources handle the lion’s share of your security needs, your in-house employees can focus on other critical matters, much as they could with automated solutions. It’s no surprise, then, to find out that many outsourced IT providers expertly utilize automation.
Catalyst Technology Group can help you with any of these strategies. Call us at (317) 705-0333 for more information.
Managed IT Protects Your Business And Your Budget
When it comes to maintaining and managing technology properly, larger businesses traditionally have the advantage over small-and-medium-sized ones, as they have greater financial resources. In fact, many small businesses will postpone these activities to help preserve the flexibility in their budget. What these businesses need is a way to leverage the benefits of proactive IT maintenance without breaking the bank.
Small businesses face considerable difficulties when trying to maintain their IT. First of all, since they generally have fewer employees, the workload is heavier for each resource. This leads to IT management being postponed in favor of other, seemingly more important concerns. However, this strategy accomplishes little more than putting the company in a more precarious position. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that hiring the personnel that could help you better manage your IT is often prohibitively expensive.
If neither option is practical, business in this position should turn to option three: managed IT services.
Managed services are a much different approach than what many would perceive as the typical IT service process, referred to as break/fix. Let’s say one of your pieces of hardware isn’t operating correctly. Once you report the issue to your IT provider, they dispatch someone to your location to resolve the problem, and you’re left on the hook paying a bill for that one specific call. You lose the capital, but also the potential revenue from the downtime you have experienced. This reactive approach therefore is quite a bit costlier than the increasingly more popular managed service model, which takes a proactive stance against technology issues.
At Catalyst Technology Group, we follow this proactive approach, monitoring your solutions remotely so that we can prevent issues from influencing your business, especially before they turn into bigger problems. For instance, under our managed service agreement, we will keep an eye on your infrastructure for any warning of hardware failure so you have an opportunity to replace that hardware before it can have a negative impact on your business.
If this option sounds more expensive than the break/fix approach, consider this: if you combine the loss in revenue that downtime from the broken equipment lead to and the cost of replacing or repairing the broken technology, you are out a significant amount of usable capital.
Compare that to managed services where there’s a chance that your problem could be resolved remotely–leading to a smaller service fee when compared to the cost of hardware replacement–it makes a lot of sense to see what kind of value Catalyst Technology Group’s certified technicians can bring you.
Depending on what is included in your service level agreement, the expenses associated with managed services will essentially always be less than the costs that of break/fix. Catalyst Technology Group can help you to make these changes in your own company, making operations both more reliable and less expensive in the process. To learn more about what managed IT services can do for you, give us a call at (317) 705-0333.