Ask Yourself If Your It Infrastructure Works

Hi, I’m Colin Shantz, CEO of CopperTree Solutions. And today we’re going to ask the question, what if your IT infrastructure worked?

Who We Talk To About IT Infrastructure

There are two types of organizations that we often talk to. And the first one is an organization that is having too many problems, and they’re fed up with all the issues. Thus, there are recurring problems the organization doesn’t think should be there. Or there’s a whole bunch of little things that keep happening. There might even be a few big impactful issues like a ransomware incident, or, a server crash. Those types of organizations are aware of the issues, and they feel the pain. This impacts their ability to service their clients. And, then they realize that to move forward they’re going to have to do something different.

The second type of organization that we talk to is a little different from the first one. And, they’re more in the dark about what’s possible. So, from their perspective, things are pretty good. They haven’t had too many major impactful issues. Additionally, they’re not things aren’t perfect, but they’re okay. Also, they are, from their perspective good enough.

Generally, we come into these organizations and start to dig around under the hood. And what we realize is, that they’re not okay. Or, there’s a lot of risk within the infrastructure they weren’t aware of. And oftentimes, you know, business leaders, you don’t know what you don’t know. Generally, if no one warns you of the risks in your infrastructure, you don’t know about them until something happens. And the last thing a business leader wants is unpreparedness. Additionally, they don’t want to suffer an incident that brings your business down. Or, even worse, something that prevents you from servicing your clients. So those are the two kinds of organizations that I talk to on a regular basis.

Questions These Organizations Should Be Asking About IT Infrastructure

Luckily, there’s a solution for both of them. When I talk to business leaders, I always ask them a question like, “what do you want from technology?” Or, “how do you measure success in technology?” And it turns out we all pretty much want the same things. At the end of the day, what everybody wants is, for IT infrastructure to work. I want to come in every day and do what I do. And I want to have my staff come in every day and do what they do, and what I’m paying them to do. Additionally, I don’t want people to be:

• dealing with problems,
• calling people, opening tickets,
• Googling things,
• trying to figure things out,
• restarting things.

We want to use these tools. And, at the end of the day, that’s what technology is. It’s a tool that you can leverage within your organization.

The second thing people want is, to sleep at night, knowing that our risks are manageable. Also, they want to know that we’ve done everything that’s appropriate to do for an organization of our size. Do we have a plan in place for when that inevitable worst-case scenario happens? And do we know how long we’ll be down? How long it’ll take to get back up and running again? And are we comfortable with the plan? If you’re running 24-7 operations, and your IT infrastructure is down for half a day:

• what’s the impact on your organization?
• Can you afford that?
• And if the answer is no, what do we do about it?
• And how do we put a different plan in place to allow us to get back up and running fast?

Other IT Infrastructure Questions

The third thing people ask for is, knowing that they have the right tools in place. Is there other technology that our organization could be using? Or are there things that could help us:

• gather better data
• get better visibility into what’s happening within our organization to make better decisions
• streamline communication both internally and with our clients

So, it’s looking at the big picture. What does everybody want? Everybody wants things, like IT infrastructure, to work. I want to sleep at night knowing that my risks are manageable. And I want to feel like we have the right tools to do the job. So, how do we get to that exact place?

Here at CopperTree

At CopperTree, we have a process that we use and that we follow with every one of our clients to get to that place. Generally, it starts with the strategic plan. It starts with us understanding:

• your organization,
• what your goals are,
• what are your plans are
• where are we today,
• where are we trying to get to tomorrow,
• and what kind of technology you have in place right now.

Moreover, once we understand your business, we can put together a roadmap. This lets us say to say, if this is where we are today, and this is where we want to be, here’s what we need to do to get there.

We also focus on maintenance. So, every month we go through and do what we call our technology alignment. We look at your IT infrastructure and our best practices. Then, we get a health score that says if you’re 99% aligned, things are pretty good. Or you’re 83% aligned, and there are a few recommendations that need to occur. But, it’s designed to give the business leader visibility into your current technology. Also, it gives a measurement to say, here’s where we are, and here are some areas that we need to make some changes. There could be some systems that need upgrades, or we need to change how we work in a certain area. So we do that on a monthly basis.

Other Things CopperTree Does

Additionally, we are also behind the scenes. We’re always monitoring the IT infrastructure. If there’s something that goes wrong, it creates an alert, and we can jump on and resolve the issue for you. Also, it’s an automation platform. It allows us to take care of:

• day-to-day maintenance tasks,
• installing the updates,
• pushing out software,
• monitoring your backups.

And then, there’s support. So, as needed, we’ll solve any issues that come up. But, if you have the right technology configured, monitored, and maintained, problems go away. And that’s our ultimate goal. We want to get you to that place where things work. Where your risks are manageable, and you feel like you have the right tools. Thanks for joining me today, as we ask ourselves the question, what if our IT infrastructure just worked?

To learn more, please visit our website at CopperTreeSolutions.ca.