One of the best ways business leaders can prevent someone from hacking into their business systems and stealing valuable information is to understand their options for keeping their technology up to date.
First of all, business owners need to establish how or why their technology or information systems became outdated. There are many reasons technology becomes out of date in a business and understanding the cause behind this can help owners decide the best plan of action.
Some reasons include setting something up years ago and not noticing it aging; having support staff who think they are saving money by applying short-term solutions to recurring problems and having the mindset of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’.
The next step is managing the process of updating your business technology. This does not solely involve getting new technology; it also involves getting a team of people to work together to implement change.
Owners should assess their team to work out if they are the right people to get the business technology to where it needs to be. Quite often, the time it takes to update the technology and take staff away from the daily operations of a business is more expensive than the upgrade process. This is why owners should consider training their staff for the ongoing running of new systems, rather than training them to implement a technology update once.
Owners need to determine whether they need to replace their entire system or bring it up to a current version to meet business requirements. If system replacement is required, assessing available tools to determine the best solution may require business analysis and product selection. Doing this correctly will ensure that the money spent brings value to the business.
Following up the update with user acceptance training can contribute to ensuring that the new systems are used more efficiently by staff. Employees who are afraid of new IT systems or feel incompetent to do their jobs can have quite an impact on morale and lead to other issues in the business.
