With the constantly evolving landscape of digitalisation, an IT Assurance Review has become a crucial aspect of business processes. In this blog, we will explore the importance and benefits of conducting an IT assurance review for your business to help you assess your technology and system effectiveness, identify risks and opportunities, and develop a roadmap for improvement.
What is an IT Assurance Review?
An IT Assurance Review typically involves assessing your business's current trajectory, where its priorities are focused, and where it plans to take strategic initiatives. This helps identify potential overlaps and gaps that technology and systems need to cover. Reviewing the future direction will also help identify opportunities to leverage technology to provide enhanced services, including better efficiency, security, and implementation of new technology.
The review will result in recommendations which will help your organisation to plan its processes and create a technology roadmap that will underpin execution of the business strategy for the next 5-10 years.
What does a review involve?
An IT Assurance Review will provide a comprehensive evaluation of your business's current technology and systems. It involves a thorough understanding of your organisation, systems and objectives, identification of current pain points where the technology seems at fault, and an analysis of current IT spend versus budget. By looking at all aspects in detail, companies can make informed decisions about which systems should be retained, improved, or replaced.
Areas of assessment
The review will likely cover the following areas:
- Strategy assessment
This will provide a gap analysis between your organisation’s expectations of IT delivery and that which is actually received. This will evaluate factors such as the suitability of technical infrastructure to objectives, IT capacity, SLAs, IT spend and commercial benchmarking, and incident management.
- Security assessment
This will assess your organisation’s security tools, including security software, perimeter security (firewalls), remote access, and protection of IP. The assessment will also review governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) to identify policies that are critical to protecting the business, and where none exist, put plans in place to create them.
- Technical architecture review
The infrastructure will be reviewed for its overall suitability in terms of reliability, scalability, and applicability to your business requirements. Ultimately the purpose of this piece of the assessment is to ensure the technical foundations are in place to enable IT to carry out its services to end users.
This part of the review may be broken into:
- Infrastructure: cloud, devices, SQL, security, licensing, network
- People & process: skills, gap analysis, team structure, IT service management tooling
Post-assessment
The combination of understanding where the business is headed, identifying gaps in processes and procedures, and conducting a deep dive technology review will provide a comprehensive report and set of recommendations to improve IT functionality, build a secure IT environment, and foster business resilience. Insights from this review, coupled with best practice and benchmarking data, are instrumental in suggesting the appropriate technology solutions and governance structure for IT systems to support your organisation's aims.
A final report will aggregate all findings and provide recommendations for remediation and/or change. Ultimately, the recommendations provided in the final report can serve as a blueprint for strategic IT decisions, aligning your technology with your organisational goals, and setting you up for long-term success.
Interested in conducting an IT Assurance Review for your organisation? Speak to us today.
Written by Graeme Vermeulen: Head of Technical Architecture