Small businesses need an IT roadmap to guide them through the growth process. It’s a common mistake for small businesses to wing it, which leads to expensive oversights, changes to incompatible legacy systems, and chaos in their network environment. Instead of unorganized IT, building an IT roadmap gives much more efficiency to IT budgets and provides scalable systems. 

Decide Why You Need IT

This point might seem obvious, but it’s an important first step to organize your goals. You might already have IT for authorization and sharing files, but you might need additional IT infrastructure if you want to build an application for customers to book appointments, check their orders, or communicate with your staff more efficiently than email messages. The purpose for your new IT infrastructure depends on your business goals, but it will help you decide what infrastructure you need.

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You might need help with infrastructure deployments, but you can identify your future business goals. These goals are then tied to IT. Goals tied to IT can then determine the right architecture, software, and hardware necessary to complete your goals. Some goals might require the rollout of cloud infrastructure. For example, the use of AI requires cloud computing for affordability. You can tie in AI infrastructure with your applications for intelligent predictions and analysis.

To determine goals, you might need to involve all stakeholders. If you are the founder and sole stakeholder, build a plan that sees your business goals aligned with IT for the foreseeable future. It’s expensive to change to another strategy, especially with IT infrastructure. You want to go over all goals so that your future infrastructure is scalable. Scalability also requires the ability to change as your business grows, so taking this first step saves you money in the long-run.

Audit Your Current Infrastructure

Every environment has its own current hardware and software, so you must audit it for several reasons. The first is to drive your future infrastructure choices. For example, if you prefer Windows, maybe you prefer having Windows servers and Azure as a cloud platform. Windows infrastructure integrates more easily with other Windows products, but it’s not an absolute requirement. Your IT roadmap needs to consider integration with current infrastructure.

Auditing your current environment also helps with discovery of gaps where you could be missing critical components. For example, small businesses often have gaps in cybersecurity infrastructure. These gaps give attackers opportunities to exploit them and steal data. A data breach can ruin your business reputation and cost enough to bankrupt it. A good audit will help you discover these types of gaps.

You’ll see the term SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) referenced as you look into an IT roadmap. If you hire a professional to help you with an audit, SWOT is part of the process. Using a SWOT strategy, you will get an overall picture of your environment so that you can identify the right new infrastructure to add to it.

A final component in an audit is identifying areas of improvement for speed and productivity. If you haven’t had a professional managing your IT infrastructure, then it likely has bottlenecks. A network that just works is different from an inefficient network harming productivity. The audit will identify these issues as well and build a plan to remediate them.

Determine Your Budget and Prioritize Efforts

The first plan is your ideal wish list, but you probably have a budget that limits what can be deployed initially. This is why a priority list is important. Your budget must match the priority list, so you can determine the infrastructure to roll out initially. Later, as the business grows, additional infrastructure can be added.

A professional will help you decide on critical infrastructure versus what can wait. For example, if you want to work with AI but don’t have the application built yet, you might wait for AI infrastructure and save on costs initially. The initial deployment can be limited to only the necessities to save on costs. 

Scalable infrastructure might cost a bit more, but it’s necessary for your future. You need scalability to ensure that IT is not your business growth bottleneck. As an example, you must deploy enough storage space to ensure that your applications can continue to run without issues. Running out of disk space can be devastating to business growth, especially if it’s not monitored. Network monitoring is one way to ensure that you stay scalable as well. It will let your administrators know when it’s time for an upgrade.

Deployment and Migration

After you audit and budget your costs, you then build a deployment and migration plan. This plan should be step by step instructions on deploying new infrastructure and connecting it to the current environment. Usually, the time is set up based on your office hours and low-volume customer activity.

You likely want your current data migrated to your new environment, so a migration plan is also necessary. Whether it’s migration to new onsite infrastructure or to the cloud, you need a plan before it happens. The migration plan will protect from data loss and corruption and eliminate potential bugs from the environment after new infrastructure is deployed.

Testing and Bug Fixes

After migration, you need a plan for testing and bug fixes. A professional will always have a test plan for you to avoid any long-term revenue consequences. Testing is performed across all new IT infrastructure and monitored for any unforeseen bugs.

Stakeholders responsible for productivity might be included with testing to ensure that the new environment runs as expected. After testing, the professionals can monitor the environment for any issues including cybersecurity incidents. If you don’t have professionals to monitor your environment, you can work with a managed service provider to monitor it for you.

If you need help building an IT roadmap or monitoring your environment, contact us to see what we can do for you.

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