Ten Effective Habits of Indispensable IT Departments

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1 Kaseya Industry Alert Ten Effective Habits of Indispensable IT Departments It s no secret that responsibilities are growing while budgets continue to shrink. Enact these ten IT habits throughout your IT organization to help you cut costs, create operational efficiencies and align IT to business goals.

2 Kaseya Industry Alert Ten Effective Habits of Indispensable IT Departments Effective IT Habit #1 Understand the business goals To the people in charge, IT is all too often seen as a cost, simply an expensive line item on the balance sheet. Show value by learning about the products and services your company provides and the business processes employees use to get goods out the door and in customers hands. This enables you to prioritize IT projects within the company and make IT work for users and the organization as a whole. But don t stop there. Cast a wider net by talking to people on the ground and in the boardroom to truly understand how your organization runs and how you can make it run more efficiently. Effective IT Habit #2 Focus on the projects that will drive down costs IT can t do everything, and you can t be everywhere at once. All too often, the tasks that take the most time are inconsequential to most users. Instead of simply plugging away in the background, prioritize IT projects that have the potential to deliver maximum benefits. Identify highly-visible business systems that either cut costs or drive revenue, and work on making those systems run smoothly, faster and more efficiently. People will notice that IT also has its eye on the bottom line. Effective IT Habit #3 Make cloud computing work for you Contrary to popular belief, cloud computing will not hasten the extinction of the internal IT organization. Sure, you won t always be defragging hard drives or running a patch. Instead, expertise will be needed. In addition, data will continue to live in and out of the cloud, making data security, data protection, network availability and integration increasingly important business functions. Someone is going to have to manage multiple relationships with cloud vendors and the process of integrating various services. It s likely going to fall to you. Effective IT Habit #4 Don t be afraid of embracing industry trends One of the best ways to preserve your spot in the pecking order is to broaden your horizons by taking on more responsibility. Virtualization, cloud computing, social media, SEO and mobile computing are technologies and trends that are growing increasingly important to the success of the business. Don t let marketing take all the credit for revenue streams driven by a social media platform that IT helped build and continues to grow and manage. Be out on the forefront of these new technologies and claim their management as part of IT s role. You ll get the responsibility and the credit. Effective IT Habit #5 Recognize the benefits of user self-service New responsibilities shouldn t mean a drop off in service for other, equally important IT functions. Just shift the management responsibility to users. Create user self-service policies that allow employees to make preapproved changes to their systems without IT involvement. Enable software downloads, knowledgebase access and ticket entry, saving you time on tasks that previously required manual administration. This allows you to free up your staff to work on other, more strategic projects that create efficiencies or drive revenue. Effective IT Habit #6 Ditch the point solutions for one integrated solution An integrated IT systems management solution gives you a holistic view of your IT environment as well as the ability to make granular changes to individual systems. Automation is the key. Making changes on groups of machines saves hours of manual, repetitive administration, making IT more efficient and more cost effective....truly understand how your organization runs and how you can make it run more efficiently. Be out on the forefront of these new technologies and claim their management as part of IT s role. Automation is the key. Making changes on groups of machines saves hours of manual, repetitive administration, making IT more efficient and more cost effective..

3 Kaseya Industry Alert Ten Effective Habits of Indispensable IT Departments Effective IT Habit #7 Keep your organization s data safe Today s dynamic business environment is based on the seamless flow of information across facilities, mobile devices and customer sites around the world, making your organization s data highly vulnerable to theft and loss. Don t wait until your company is plastered on the evening news to make a robust data security and data protection policy. Make sure you can monitor, track, secure and back up every system that connects to the corporate network including employees personal mobile devices. Visibility across the entire IT environment and control over every system ensures your organization s data is safe. Effective IT Habit #8 Identify potential problems before they become major issues Being proactive allows you to head off potential problems before they become major issues. Running around putting out fires never worked for anyone. Prevention keeps the organization running smoothly. An IT systems management solution that monitors and alerts administrators to problems and gives them the remote access and control to remediate those problems immediately is a big advantage. Effective IT Habit #9 Work on your users machines without interrupting them No one likes to be interrupted, especially when faced with a deadline. Give yourself the ability to make changes to remote machines in the background without users aware maintenance is being done. By making the proactive visible and the reactive invisible, you give yourself a better chance of building good will and confidence with users. Effective IT Habit #10 Prove your team s worth with robust reporting Most C-level executives wouldn t know a layer-7 switch if you dropped one on their foot. And that s ok. Translate your IT successes into a language they do know. Talk about uptime, processed transactions, mobility, virus threats prevented, machines patched anything that you can translate into dollars and cents. If you want to play with the big boys, it s important to speak the vernacular. This all sounds great but how do I get started? The Kaseya IT Systems Management Solution provides IT organizations with holistic visibility into IT environments and granular control over remote systems, enabling complete services for an increasingly diverse and mobile user base. The Kaseya integrated solution allows you to build robust IT and security policies that can be enforced from a central management platform in the cloud or on premise. Instituting the Kaseya IT Systems Management solution along with these ten effective IT habits throughout your IT organization will help you truly align IT to business goals, make the organization run more smoothly, and above all, allow management to see your IT department for what it is an indispensable part of the organization. About Kaseya Kaseya is the leading global provider of IT Systems Management software. Kaseya solutions empower virtually everyone from individual consumers to large corporations and IT service providers to proactively monitor, manage and control IT assets remotely, easily and efficiently from one integrated Web-based platform. Go to for a FREE trial. Visit: healthcare@kaseya.com Like: Facebook.com/KaseyaFan 2012 Kaseya. All rights reserved. Kaseya and the Kaseya logo are among the trademarks or registered trademarks owned by or licensed to Kaseya International Limited. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. Make sure you can monitor, track, secure and back up every system that connects to the corporate network including employees personal mobile devices....align IT to business goals, make the organization run more smoothly, and above all, allow management to see your IT department for what it is an indispensable part of the organization.