What IT Documentation Should Every SMB Have?

Most small businesses know that they need IT infrastructure, but what they often forget is that you also need documentation. Documentation makes incident response, auditing, updates, configurations, and training much easier for everyone, including your IT support people. You might need to know where to start and what should be documented, so this guide will help you document your IT and get started with a review of your infrastructure.

Audit of IT Assets

Before you start, you should audit your environment. An IT audit helps with several future IT documentation and roadmaps, including risk assessments, cybersecurity strategies, incident response documentation, disaster recovery plans, and scalability designs when you need more infrastructure to support additional workforce staff. Documentation is something many people put off until the last minute when it’s absolutely necessary, but being proactive will reduce your overhead when it needs to be done.

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Here are a few ways IT audit documentation can help:

• IT strategy roadmaps: When you need to scale or you suspect that you will have a spike in business growth, knowing what IT infrastructure you’ll need to support growth will save time and money.
• Risk assessment: To have a good cybersecurity plan, you first need to know your IT infrastructure to assess what could be used as an attack vector.
• Cybersecurity strategies: With your risk assessment in hand, you can build a cybersecurity plan.
• Incident response: After a data breach, IT documentation helps identify possible attack vectors and more quickly contain the threat.
• Configuration and updates: When you need a managed service provider to make changes to the environment, add more hardware, or set up additional resources, having documentation will make the process more efficient.
• Disaster recovery plans: You need an IT audit to create a disaster recovery plan, which is necessary after a critical data breach.
• Training: When you get more staff, having IT documentation will give them a resource to get up to speed on the network environment.

Cybersecurity and Network Management

In any cybersecurity scenario, you will hear that the first step is documentation. Documentation helps IT professionals identify risks and track new devices on the network. Shadow IT is an issue where a user might add infrastructure to the environment and use it to steal data. If devices are documented, you can more quickly identify when a rogue device is present on the network and disable it.

Another reason to document infrastructure is to track user personal devices. Most businesses allow users to access work resources using their own laptop or smartphone. This often leads to better productivity, but it opens your network to potential threats. Businesses can allow devices on the network and monitor them for threats while still being flexible with employee device choices to do their work.

For network management, IT documentation should track user account policies. As the business grows, you might lose track of user accounts. Leaving user accounts active across the environment even after they leave the company is a huge security risk. Any account that isn’t tracked could be a security risk, but this risk is reduced when you document accounts. 

When employees leave the company, you can forward email to their supervisor and deactivate the account. The account deactivation should be across the entire environment, especially cloud applications where the user could potentially access these applications from a remote location. Account tracking is tedious, so IT support for network management is a benefit for small businesses that don’t have the resources to track this type of activity.

Disaster Recovery Plans and Incident Response

Every business should document their disaster recovery plan. A disaster recovery plan is a document that tells IT support and stakeholders what happens if an incident affects your environment. A disaster recovery plan could be put into action from a cyber-incident where a threat stole data from your network, a user fell for a phishing email, or a case of physical destruction from events like a flood or fire. It can also help with what to do after a physical break-in at your office location.

You’ll see that many of the other IT documentation items fit into a disaster recovery plan. Here are a few items:

• An IT audit of the network environment
• Risk assessment of the network environment
• Recovery objectives to define how long the network can be down and how long it takes for downtime to affect business continuity
• Backup policies and storage locations
• Communication hierarchy and stakeholders for each asset

Asset Configuration and Patch Management

As your IT environment grows, you have more configurations to manage. You must also patch hardware and software with the latest security patches and updates to keep it secure from new threats. This step too can be tedious, especially for small businesses where they don’t have any dedicated staff to manage changing IT configurations.

Monitoring configuration changes might seem unnecessary, but it will help when new staff is onboarded and must manage any issues as an IT support person. You can also have an easier time onboarding a managed service provider when the provider remotely monitors your network. Documenting network configuration changes also helps with disaster recovery. For example, a configuration change can cause an outage and must be rolled back to resume productivity as soon as possible. 

When a new security patch is available, it should be applied to avoid leaving vulnerabilities on the network. Having an audit and documentation of the environment configurations also helps with patching. Staff or a managed service provider can avoid common pitfalls when they have documentation of the configurations. For example, a configuration might be reset during a patch installation. The person in charge of IT infrastructure can then reconfigure the resource to ensure that service is not disrupted.

Who Can Help with IT Documentation

Most small businesses don’t have the time to document their environment. That’s where a managed service provider can help. Corporate Technologies can go through your network, document what’s needed, and then help with an IT roadmap to help your business scale.

Contact us today to find out how we can help.

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