Technology Alignment Planning
The theory of technology alignment has been around since the 1990s. It is primarily focused on ensuring your IT infrastructure and strategies perfectly match your business goals.
Don’t worry; you are not alone if you are familiar with the term but unsure exactly what this means or how to implement it. We’re hoping that we can provide you with a better understanding of how crucial our Technology Alignment Plan can properly support your business.
Synchronising your technology and business strategies to align with your growth goals sounds like a no-brainer, but it is all too easy for them to fall out of alignment. This is especially so for Small to Medium Sized Businesses who often do not invest adequately in their IT and Technology budget to keep up with digital & technological advancements. In today’s volatile economic environment, it is essential that businesses ensure that the technology and solutions they use and require every day are working for them and not against them.
Thankfully, the concept of technology alignment has now become more than just a buzzword; it's now a fundamental strategy that can make or break the success of a business.
At TwentyFour IT Services, we cover Technology Alignment as part of our Annual and Quarterly Business Reviews with all our clients working with them on their business growth goals to ensure that their Technology Alignment Plan aligns with their Business Growth Strategy.
Recent research shows us that:
- Relying on out-of-date and ageing equipment and software is costing businesses billions every year.
- Businesses lose customers over cyber security risks and user experience ratings associated with dated software.
- Over 50% of software licenses go unused.
Let's talk about comprehensive IT Support
Our comprehensive IT support, which heavily integrates technology alignment across our client base, involves combining various elements of IT support, services, and technology recommendations into one unified plan, making it easier for you to manage and supporting your business growth.
We understand that your business relies on a lot of different moving parts to function properly. This is why we pride ourselves on understanding each and every one of our customers' businesses. From the very first meeting, we work to understand your business, how you operate, what is important to you, what your pain points are, and what your plans are. By doing this, and through regular Quarterly and Annual Business Reviews, we can ensure that we are enabling your business to succeed.
For many businesses, you have computers, servers, cloud services, software (including Software as a Service/SaaS), and mobile devices all working in tandem. You rely on phone and Internet services to communicate, including email, as well as physical networking infrastructure such as switches, firewalls and wi-fi access points for all your devices to connect to.
Just from these key considerations alone, many gears are spinning to keep the engine running!
But what happens when one of those pieces of the machine starts to malfunction or becomes old and degraded? Just one of these pieces can have a knock-on effect that could impact how the entire machine operates or prevent it from working altogether. This is why we take a holistic view of IT by prioritising essential technologies as part of a much larger picture.
We ensure to focus on four key areas: Managed IT (Including your business devices and infrastructure), Cloud Services, Business Continuity (including Backups, High Availability, and Redundancy Planning) and Cyber Security.
These services form the backbone of any successful comprehensive IT strategy. Investing in them allows you to spend more time growing your business instead of worrying about the technology that supports it.
How does Technology Alignment link with your IT Strategy?
Regardless of if you have comprehensive IT support in place if your technology does not align with your business growth strategy, then you're already losing.
Give a woodman a pen knife and he will eventually chop down a tree, give him an axe he will do it faster, give him a saw he will do it even faster than that.
Ensuring that your business has the right tools and solutions in place can improve productivity, increase efficiency, and lead your business to success. This is where technology alignment comes in. Not only does technology alignment ensure that your business meets minimum hardware requirements for modern operating systems (such as Windows 11), or meets minimum requirements to comply with an industry-recognised minimum cyber defence level, but it also ensures that the hardware, software, and solutions in place enable the people in your business to be able to work productively and effectively.
We strongly believe that every business is unique and that because every business is unique, your IT support must also be unique. Understanding your business, and how the people in your business operate, what their roles and responsibilities are, it ensures that we can recommend the right tools and solutions to help your business succeed.
Let's have a look at just a few examples;
Legal Scenario: A law firm struggles with secure document management, remote collaboration for litigators, and keeping up with data privacy regulations. Traditionally all their data has existed on an internal network storage solution (Server/NAS) which everyone can access if they are in the business.
Solution: We implement a secure, cloud-based document management system which can be accessed from devices that are managed by the business, paired with privileged identity access controls, audit trails and encryption, ensuring compliance with data privacy laws.
Accounting Scenario: Your small accountancy firm has not updated its computer hardware in more than 7 years, is still running Windows 10, and manages its own IT.
Solution: Older devices, especially those that are not compatible with Windows 11, pose a significant risk to your business. Not only will Windows 10 become End of Life in October 2025, posing a significant cyber security risk as it will no longer receive security updates, but these older devices will also experience reliability and performance issues as time goes on.
Manufacturing Scenario: A mid-sized window manufacturer has unmanaged terminals on their workshop floor for stock management, job assignment, cutting lists, and more. However, these devices often lose connection to the internet.
Solution: Unmanaged devices can pose a cyber security risk to your business. These devices do not follow company policies for updates, cyber security tools and much more, whilst also being connected to your business for sending and receiving data. Integrating these devices into your IT support strategy means that they can be remotely monitored and managed in line with your business policies, ensuring that they do not pose a security risk to your business network.
Additionally, by conducting an audit of where these terminals are located and regularly used, we can ensure that wired and wireless infrastructure meets the demands of your business, improving both connectivity and productivity.
Architecture Scenario: A small architectural practice is noticing compatibility issues and crashes with software that their team require to be able to complete jobs for their clients, leading to longer lead times and losing out on jobs to competitors.
Solution: The firm had not effectively assessed the evolving system requirements of the software their team uses. Whilst their devices used to meet the minimum requirements for the software they use, this has not been evaluated in some time and recent software updates mean that they are no longer compatible.
Our Device Lifecycle Management system monitors for specification requirements to meet the growing needs of individual businesses and is assessed regularly to ensure that devices meet growing hardware requirements. This allows us to regularly recommend where businesses may need to allocate spending to upgrade or replace older devices to meet these evolving needs. Additionally, it allows us to be alerted if devices are experiencing performance issues because their software requires more resources than those available.
We understand that internal IT departments cannot be available at all hours of the day, but that depending upon the business and industry, employees may need help with support tickets and queries late into the evening, or in the early hours of the morning.
A simplified step towards technological alignment and comprehensive support is ensuring that your business devices meet minimum hardware requirements. Keep an eye out for our dedicated article about this topic & the essential considerations for key roles within your business.
What does your work computer rely on for cyber security?
It is important to consider that technology alignment is more than just about the hardware and infrastructure that you use, but also about the software, solutions, and security that you have in place. It is an essential element of your business cyber security strategy.
Scarily, we still hear businesses saying, "We just use free anti-virus...” While that might seem like a cheap and simplified solution, it is an extremely dangerous misconception. It is like locking your house door, but leaving the windows open, the alarm off, and the security cameras disconnected.
Traditional signature-based anti-virus is only about 30% effective against the more than 560,000 new threats discovered daily. Cyber criminals are now using AI tools to create polymorphic and metamorphic malware, meaning that for every new system their malware infects, it has an entirely new and untraceable signature.
As cyber threats evolve, businesses must align their cyber security strategy to combat these new threats. Using AI cyber security tools to combat AI threats. Our Managed Endpoint Detection and Response platform, combined with Application & Device Ringfencing, uses AI and machine learning tools to monitor for unusual, suspicious, and malicious activity, blocking it in its tracks.
Similarly, our AI-powered Advanced Email Threat Protection platform can monitor for unusual or suspicious language or requests, links in emails, attachments, and even the idiolect of emails from people compared to previous emails.
Our round-the-clock monitoring for those who require it, and support of hardware, infrastructure, and cyber threats ensure that your business has the support it needs when (and where) it needs it. When you outsource your IT to TwentyFour IT Services, you can be sure in the knowledge that we are there to support you with your business growth.
Technology alignment is a holistic approach to your IT and Cyber Security strategy, ensuring not only that your business can operate effectively and securely, but that it can do so for years to come and enabling your business to grow.
We can walk you through the journey by choosing the right tools, implementing strong security measures, and providing reliable IT support along the way. Contact us to let us guide you towards a simplified IT strategy that empowers your business, not one that holds it back.