Technology is a necessary part of most businesses, helping them to achieve their goals and vision. However, if you do not take proper precautions as a business owner, cybercriminals can easily infiltrate your network and cause all sorts of trouble. Technology auditing is the best way to solve this problem, and today we’re visiting why you should prioritize your technology gaps.
A technology audit can help you identify and understand the gaps in your organization’s security, compliance, and backup posture. But if you’re not familiar with IT, the findings of a technology audit can be hard to understand. You may be overwhelmed by the number of items that need to be refreshed or replaced, and you may not know where to start.
We’ve been through many technology audits (in fact, we perform them as part of managing our managed services clients) and we have several tactics to help your leadership team prioritize the gaps that inevitably show up.
Fix the Critical Gaps Immediately
When you perform an audit, you may find that your system has hundreds of vulnerabilities. So you’ll have to ask yourself, “Should I fix all of them at once?”
Fixing all the gaps at once is rarely practical, because it can be both expensive and time-consuming.
Our recommendation is always to fix the most critical vulnerabilities first. Even if they require more time and effort, fixing the most critical issues first will give you the biggest bang for your buck.
Budget Based on Audit Results
Budgets help you meet organizational objectives by providing a plan for your use of resources. Randomly allocating funds to fix vulnerabilities will not help you address potential threats and will likely not be a wise budgetary decision.
Fix the critical items first, then budget for the smaller items based on audit results. You can plan the projects out over time, addressing the most critical issues first and then working your way through the list. This will help you ensure that you are addressing the most critical issues and will keep you on track to fix the remaining, less urgent issues.
Divide and Conquer
Divide and conquer the task to make it easier. When you have a large list of vulnerabilities to address, it can be overwhelming. It’s easy to get stuck in the weeds and try to fix everything at once. That’s why one of the best strategies for tackling this type of project is dividing and conquering. This means that you break down the task into smaller chunks, which makes it easier to tackle each item individually instead of feeling overwhelmed by all the work that needs to be done.
For example, if you have a list of 150 vulnerabilities to address, you might break it down into 10 vulnerability lists. Each vulnerability list contains 15 items. Then, you can work through each list one by one and cross off the items as they are addressed. This will help prevent burnout from trying to fix everything at once.
The most important thing to understand is that technology gaps exist in any business. They’re unavoidable. But the good news is that they can be fixed sooner than you might think—that’s the real takeaway here.
Need a friendly person to talk to on why you should prioritize your technology gaps? We’re always here to help.
