How IT Assessments Create Value and Mitigate Risk

An IT assessment adds value because they quantify how your technology investment directly supports your organization’s business goals. In addition, they help uncover hidden technology risks, misaligned investments, and opportunities for upgrades or new technologies. As a result, an IT assessment is important to developing your IT strategy.

In brief:

• IT assessments reveal both the business value of technology and the risks they pose that threaten operations.
• Assessments inform IT strategy by aligning technology investments with business goals.
• Common IT assessment findings include gaps in cybersecurity, disaster recovery, patching, and IT skills.
• Risk analysis is another core output of IT assessments. It clarifies threats, impacts, and compliance exposure.
• Acting on the findings of your IT assessment and risk analysis helps you benchmark your costs, control your spend, improve resilience, and protect organizational value.

An IT assessment is a unique value-building tool: It underscores the value of digital assets and the value of the IT program itself. At the same time, it safeguards the company’s value by identifying risks that could threaten operations.

A comprehensive assessment can prevent hardware or software failures, security breaches, and other incidents that could clog your revenue stream. Here’s a breakdown of how IT assessments work, generate and protect value, and mitigate organizational risk

What Is an IT Assessment?

An IT assessment involves evaluating your organization’s systems, data, and apps to understand how they support — or add risk to — the business.

IT assessments and IT strategy are closely linked, particularly because they answer similar questions:

• How does technology support the business’s goals?
• Which risks need to be better understood and more effectively managed?
• Are our IT investments delivering sufficient value?

The Importance of Creating Value

It’s important to remember that a technology assessment is more than a passive evaluation of your assets and systems. It’s actually a system designed to create and enhance value, which often reflects how specific IT functions or tools empower operations.

For example, a thorough IT assessment often includes examining your compliance mechanisms. Suppose a financial services company needs to meet standards outlined in the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), as well as anti-money laundering (AML) measures.

An IT assessment would ask questions such as:

• Are our BSA/AML systems up to par? If not, which compliance risks do they introduce?
• At a high level, how can we improve them?

At the conclusion of the assessment, the organization would have a clear understanding of its compliance risks and the gaps it needs to address.

Performing these kinds of assessments is critical. For instance, Block, Inc., the owner of Cash App, recently received a $40 million fine from the state of New York.

The Department of Financial Services found that Block’s BSA/AML program had glaring gaps, such as “inadequate customer due diligence, failure to implement sufficient risk-based controls designed to prevent money laundering and illicit activity, and failure to effectively and timely monitor transactions.”

A technology assessment by experienced experts could have identified these issues — and prevented a $40 million loss.

Understanding Your IT Risk Analysis

Your IT risk analysis is an output of your IT assessment. The assessment identifies systems that could pose risk, and the IT risk analysis breaks down exactly what could go wrong and the impact of each potential incident.

To accomplish this, an IT risk analysis puts a microscope on each risk and clearly identifies the threat it poses.

For instance, an IT risk analysis may include a finding such as:

• Weak MFA enforcement on remote access systems
• Unauthorized access to customer data
• Theft of stolen sensitive information
• Compliance risk, specifically during an NIST SP 800-171/CMMC, SOC 2, ISO 27001, or other regulatory compliance assessment.

With your IT risk analysis in hand, you have a clear understanding of your risks and their potential impact on security and operations.

Why Assessing Risk Is Foundational to IT Strategy

The assessment process is essential to your IT strategy because it underscores the value of IT while mitigating the risk it may introduce.

For instance, suppose a manufacturer has an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system used for scheduling production and managing fulfillment. The IT assessment documents that the ERP is a powerful asset. It serves as a hub, integrating data flowing to and from the factory, inventory, maintenance, and warehouse systems.

At the same time, the assessment highlights a key risk: There’s no patch management system in place for the ERP. Therefore, some components haven’t been patched in over a year. Those components could expose the system to ransomware attacks or other cyber incidents, resulting in outages.

In this way, the assessment both underscores the value of an IT asset and enhances it by highlighting ways it can be more effective.

Common Risks Uncovered in Assessments

IT assessments frequently reveal patterns, such as:

• Inadequate disaster recovery systems
• Inadequate cybersecurity tools or processes
• Untested backup plans
• Shadow IT that could introduce malware
• Legacy applications that the producer no longer supports with updates or patches
• Skills gaps within internal IT teams

An IT assessment can identify these risks early. Using the insights from the assessments, leaders can systematically address them.

Keys to a Successful IT Assessment

Your IT assessment’s success hinges on identifying and enhancing the value of IT, but it is not a one-time process. Each of the keys below are greatly enhanced when assessments are performed regularly. This helps ensure that objectives, infrastructure, apps, data, cybersecurity, and more constantly align to business objectives.

Define Clear Objectives

Because IT objectives support business objectives, you must define objectives by asking, “Where is the business going?” You then assess how well IT is supporting this trajectory.

Evaluate Infrastructure and Applications

Your infrastructure evaluation will be easier if you make a list of your systems and apps, such as data, network components, cloud apps, on-prem apps, and hardware.

Once you have your list, you can identify any duplicate tools as well as those that aren’t aligned with business objectives. You can then rationalize your IT assets and decide which ones have potential to add more value and which can be retired, replaced, or consolidated.

Consider the Data

When you have data on the use of IT assets, their performance, and their security, you should include them in your evaluation.

For instance, a healthcare clinic may have an on-prem server and a logging system that checks its performance. A quick look at a log report shows that the server experiences 98 percent CPU usage during peak hours, resulting in 750 milliseconds of latency even for very simple requests.

Using this data from the assessment, the head of IT may authorize an SSD upgrade or doubling the server’s RAM to ease the burden on the CPU.

Review IT Spend and Resources

An assessment may reveal spending issues such as:

• Overspending on app licenses, such as having a license that allows 100 concurrent users when you only have 13
• Expensive maintenance contracts that could be reduced by buying relatively inexpensive new hardware
• Hardware, such as servers, that use a lot of power even when they’re not running anywhere near full capacity

Addressing these and similar issues adds more net value to your IT system.

Assess Cybersecurity Posture

A cybersecurity posture assessment typically involves evaluating:

1. Security controls
2. Monitoring systems
3. How well security aligns with internal governance and external compliance requirements
4. Incident response capabilities

Align IT with Business Strategy

Evaluating how well IT aligns with your business strategy centers around asking questions like:

• Are the projects we’re delivering having a direct impact on reaching goals around revenue and efficiency?
• Would it be better to keep a process in-house, or would outsourcing it better support the company’s strategy?
• Does our accountability map make sense? Who “owns” each process, and how are they rewarded or held accountable for its maintenance?

Putting Your Assessment Into Action

Your assessment is the first step, and you should follow up by:

• Documenting your findings. This document forms the basis for your action steps, including those you may have to table until later.
• Prioritizing action steps based on the crucial gaps. Focus on the gaps that, when closed, have the greatest positive impact on the organization’s objectives.
• Aligning your action steps with your overall IT strategy. For instance, your strategy may involve supporting sales with an intelligent online sales portal that adapts to user behavior. Upgrading your cloud infrastructure can reduce latency for shoppers and may only cost a little more per month.

Making the Assessment More Effective

An assessment can generate an impressive — and overwhelming — list of to-dos, so it’s important to make sure your action steps are feasible. Do a sanity check. Ask, “Which of these can we implement without risking burnout?”

It’s equally important to match your resources with what you’re going to do. You have to carefully allocate financial, time, and human resources to each task. Create reasonable deadlines and milestones, as well as a way to assess progress along the way.

The timeframe of your action steps can dictate the scope of detail they involve. For instance, a one-year list of action steps may be more detailed than a 3-year list, which may include higher-level objectives.

You should also review your assessment annually to ensure it aligns with current market conditions and your company’s growth.

Why Outside Expertise May Help

Having outside expertise on your side can be useful because an IT assessment takes time. It also requires a detailed, systematic approach. Many teams don’t have the bandwidth to devote sufficient time and energy to the task. Professional IT services can handle the heavy lifting while delivering a detailed, high-quality assessment.

Use IT Assessments to Add Value to IT and Your Organization

A thorough IT assessment simultaneously adds value and security for your organization. It surfaces the impact of IT systems and assets, revealing waste and vulnerabilities that, when eliminated, directly affect your bottom line.

By taking a value-focused approach, you ground your assessment in tangible benefits. Centric’s experts can help thanks to their deep experience performing IT assessments for organizations across several sectors. To see how a technology assessment can benefit your organization, Connect with us