We're not here to up-sell you - in fact, if your pre-existing solutions aren't causing a bottleneck into your business efficiency, we'll be the first to encourage you to focus your budget elsewhere when it comes to prioritisation and develop a thorough roadmap for moving your business forward through smart IT solutions.
So What Exactly Are We Auditing?
In short, everything!
In order to take you to where you want to be, we need to know exactly where you are now and where you've come from.
Our audits establish a baseline, so we know exactly where your business stands today technology-wise, as well as identifying any issues, challenges and risks (both currently known and unknown to your business) as potential stumbling blocks.
Anticipating and understanding the obstacles in your way is key to circumnavigating any damaging pitfalls.
Our vastly experienced engineers will visit your site(s) and work their way through a comprehensive list of checks and tests that encompass pretty much every facet of your organisation's IT systems.
Routers & Network Security
Many businesses are operating on fairly basic hardware that was provided by their ISP at the time of installation, to connect to the internet. This hardware is often sufficient for home usage but wholly inadequate for business premises operating beyond 2 or 3 person offices.
Enterprise-grade routers allow further customisations to enable more complex port forwarding and VPN solutions that are scalable for growing businesses running multiple applications that need to be made available 24/7 to remote workers at acceptable speeds that don't hinder the worker's productivity (or have them tearing their hair out in frustration).
It can often be the case that the hardware deployed is perfectly sufficient, but firmware upgrades have been neglected, leaving the hardware open to security vulnerabilities: ultimately placing your company data needlessly at risk.
A properly spec'd enterprise router will not only allow for extensive customisations and configurations (such as QOS - Quality of Service - a feature that prioritises particular types of data such as voice or video to achieve optimal performance), it also usually results in achieving a faster internet connection on that high-speed fibre connection you're paying for. It's a false economy to have high-speed internet connected to a bargain basement router that throttles internet speeds to that of an old copper line!
Our team will check out your on-site routers, switches and servers to ascertain whether they are fit for purpose to achieve your business goals, and to ensure network security in place is adequate for your needs.
Audit Checklist
Fill out our IT Infrastructure Audit Checklist to figure out what you need to do to make sure your workplace is up to date and your business is moving into the future.
Antivirus
The good news is that most PCs are operating some sort of antivirus solution in the workplace.
The bad news is that more often than not, the solution in use falls into one or more of these categories:
- The business is not running an enterprise-level solution providing adequate protection
- Even where the antivirus software is business class, it may not be running the latest signatures, rendering the software largely ineffective
- The end user has turned off the 'annoying' notifications because they can't make head nor tail of them
- The antivirus solution isn't being centrally and proactively managed
The difference between a standalone desktop installed antivirus software and a managed, centralised antivirus solution is akin to the difference between night and day.
With a centralised managed antivirus solution, your IT services provider can see whether or not the antivirus is running properly, has the latest virus signatures, is raising 'false positives' and much more.
No more annoying nonsensical pop-ups for Ian from Human Resources to contend with - it's all proactively monitored and managed remotely.
Our team will check out your current antivirus protection for effectiveness, ease of management and scalability during the site audit.
Wireless
Grabbed a coffee at Starbucks lately? Perhaps you've found that the wifi you use when sipping your latte vastly outperforms your own in house wireless solution? It's not an uncommon story.
Many businesses implement a basic wireless solution in those heady early days, and neglect to scale it as the business (and its workforce) grows, often exponentially.
- Are there adequate access-points in situ to cope with the volume of users who need a concurrent wireless connection to the network (on all of their many devices!)
- Is coverage evenly distributed across the entire office? If the Sales team are rarely in the office, perhaps those 2 access-points in the Sales department is overkill? Could the APs be more effectively distributed?
- What are the speeds like? Do speeds differ drastically when tested from all four corners of the office, not to mention its nooks and crannies?
- Does the wireless network mesh properly? Is there elegant hand-off from access-point to access-point, providing a seamless service to Gordon Gecko, as he purposefully strides the office corridors in his bright red braces?
- Is the wireless network operating on just 2.4GHZ or also the expanded 5GHZ range to allow for superior coverage and less interference?
- Are your WIFI networks (including guest networks) secure?
Security is still a surprisingly big issue. It's common for our auditors to discover unsecured WIFI networks, networks running default passwords, or even guest networks that facilitate unfettered access to the crown jewels (company data).
Ultimately, the acid test of a winning wireless solution is whether the users even notice it's there.
If each and every employee can turn up at the office simultaneously and each work on their wireless devices without issue (no matter where in the office they might be), congratulations: you've achieved peak WIFI mecca!
Email & Office 365
Email is often the last thing a business looks to modernise, which in honesty, makes little sense.
Many a high flying executive's workday is dictated entirely by their mailbox; why wouldn't they seek to double down on reliability and performance?
The truth is, unless your email solution is prone to breaking regularly, it will often sit there diligently doing its main job: delivering your email, inbound and outbound, without fuss.
The speed at which older email solutions achieve this is often sub-optimal - but hey, unless you've known anything different, why would you even notice, right?
These days, the most secure, reliable, scalable email solutions are cloud-based, such as Office 365.
Where our audits find a business still using an on-site email server (or worse, a free email account or email tied to the web hosting provider), we'll typically recommend moving to a cloud solution, because in almost all instances, it's both safer and more cost-effective to run your email in the cloud.
Additional benefits such as increased spam prevention, as well as contact and calendar syncing, usually make the switch to the cloud a no-brainer, but as with all of our audit activities, if there's a compelling business reason for using a different solution, we'll take that into consideration in our findings: it's all about finding the best bespoke solution for you as a business.
Website & Hosting
Most businesses have a web presence.
Typically, operating a website entails taking out three distinct services: domain procurement, monthly or yearly hosting services and DNS record management.
Many providers offer all 3 services in one package, which appeals to businesses due to ease of management (fewer fingers in the pie). Regardless, this is typically not what we would
recommend from a redundancy perspective.
Specifically, DNS records are usually best kept managed through a separate provider than your hosting company, to avoid a single point of failure (if a hosting company goes belly up, and your website disappears, you still want your email and other services dependent upon DNS records to carry on working).
In addition to checking who your services are procured through with resilience front-of-mind, we also typically investigate:
- How fast your website loads with your current hosting provider?
- Whether amendment of DNS records is chargeable, or part of the managed service?
- If there are specific laws or compliance concerns around where your website should be hosted (eg, government sites).
DESKTOP UPDATES & SECURITY
Users hate Windows updates: which explains why we frequently find that they've been manually disabled!
Hey, we get that it's super annoying when Windows decides to enforce a tediously lengthy 'crucial' update in the middle of the working day: we've seen it countless times. But disabling Windows updates in its entirety is never the (right) answer.
Conversely, allowing Windows the freedom to disrupt your workforce productivity in such an arbitrary fashion isn't ideal either.
In a perfect world, we'd find a pre-existing managed updates solution in place, whereby your managed service provider is staggering Windows updates to minimise the impact of those pesky updates that are released 'too early' - the ones that end up doing more harm than good! Better to give them time to iron out the kinks before rolling out non-crucial fixes!
Similarly, not every end user or workstation is created equal. Some users will be using bespoke software on their machine (for example, CAD software for architects) that may be affected by a specific update.
If Windows updates are being centrally and proactively managed, each workstation's custom updates will be delivered at sensible times, so as not to adversely affect or disrupt the workforce.
Finally, our auditors will be looking at desktop security (not to be confused with antivirus): the protocols and systems in place to ensure the integrity of each workstation build. We've all met those loveable rogues who like nothing more than to install their pirated software on their networked corporate workstations. Our auditors are looking for preventative measures to nip that particular headache in the bud. At the very least, an organisation policy should be in place as a disincentive to Dodgy Dave, to make him think twice before installing the latest edition of GTA on his work laptop.
The specialist software we use for organisation wide desktop auditing also produces a per-workstation report of every piece of software installed that we are able to provide at the end of the process.
Audit Checklist
Fill out our IT Infrastructure Audit Checklist to figure out what you need to do to make sure your workplace is up to date and your business is moving into the future.
Hardware & OS
Our auditors aren't here to judge! Our mission when auditing hardware is explicitly to gauge whether each specific machine in circulation is suitable to enable its user to perform their job optimally.
Whilst we will look at the age of the machines in situ, it's more crucial that we look at the specific specs of each device, and particularly the version of BIOS in use in each instance, for vulnerabilities.
Other checks include: The version of operating system, RAM allocation, age and generation of the onboard processors, and supplementary hardware.
*Older, unsupported versions of Windows are still in circulation, often well after their suitability for the purpose has expired.
*Supplementary hardware required for specific business purposes on a per workstation basis. For example, high-end video editing would typically require a better than average graphics card.
Backups
"We've got backups!" claim most organisations. Great!
Businesses are rightly concerned about losing their valuable data, so it's not uncommon to find a suitable backup product has been purchased to perform this crucial job. Unfortunately, it is uncommon to find that the product has been set up to perform correctly and managed effectively.
Our audit discovers:
- Is everything that should be being backed up, actually being backed up?
- When was the last time you checked to ensure backups are working as they should?
- What media are you using for your backups?
- Can you easily restore from your backups?
- Are the backups being stored off-site (or ideally, in the cloud)?
- Are complete system 'images' of each workstation being backed up in addition to just data?
A common concern we identify is the practice of leveraging home backup solutions for workplace or enterprise usage.
If you're backing up crucial, confidential business data to a USB hard drive that sits in the reception draw (side note: USB drives aren't ideal for this task anyway), we'll pick it up in our audit and flag it as a risk.
Web Filtering
Web filtering is in place for most organisations. Our job at the audit stage is simply to discover:
- How effective the current web filtering solution is.
- Whether internet speeds are potentially being throttled by one or two rogue workstations (for example, specific employees streaming high definition video content).
- Whether adequate reporting is in place, both in terms of ensuring adherence to organisational policy on surfing the web and also from a purely monitoring perspective (eg: how long do specific users spend surfing the web for non-business purposes)?
Next Steps
Once our comprehensive audit has been completed, there is typically a short delay while we collate all of our findings and formulate a list of recommendations, as well as perform risk assessments for each potential issues we have identified in the course of the audit.
We then issue a broad, formal report outlining all of this information in clear, plain English for you to digest, as well as schedule in some informal discussions with you to discuss our findings and answer any questions that may arise.
At the end of this stage, we will have provided your business with a categorical list of the current state of your IT services, complete with a list of risks - which feeds into the next stage in modernising your IT infrastructure: prioritisation.