Out of sight, out of mind – invisible IT

The Cloud (aka other people’s servers) can feel like an ambiguous thing, not unlike many aspects of IT.

Out of sight, out of mind

Let’s get digital

Most business managers have no trouble describing their physical space – like their building and its location. And if they own their building, they even have a good sense of the age of the roof and can tell you about the electrical service.

But accelerated by the lockdown period of remote work and cloud computing, a lot of infrastructure has become digital. And digital often equates to unseen. And with digital infrastructure growth comes unseen risk that most organizations are not prepared to handle.

You’ve got options

This gives you a few options and each is relevant at different stages of business growth.

1. Handling IT in-house with a single employee or small internal team, usually supplemented by an external computer repair company when something goes wrong.

2. Using an outsourced IT company to handle the entirety of IT.

3. Or using a hybrid approach where internal people are assigned specific tasks and serve as the bridge to an outsourced IT department that completes the additional IT requirements.

Different strokes

Like buildings are designed around how an organization operates, IT setups vary widely — and the right configuration depends on how your organization actually works.

For many organizations, the right solution is a partnership between an internal team and an outsourced provider like a Managed Service Provider (MSP) – Bryley is an MSP. There may be processes and institutional knowledge that work better staying close to the business. An MSP adds depth: several people with specialized expertise available without the overhead of hiring them full-time.

What that partnership looks like in practice differs from one organization to the next. In some Bryley has worked with, the internal person is most valuable on the strategic, business-building side — and we handle execution. In others, the internal team is closer to the machinery of the operation, and Bryley has a seat at the strategic table. There’s no standard way to integrate an internal team and the deep bench of an MSP.

What matters is finding the division of responsibility that fits how your organization works.

What does an IT team do?

Like the architect of your physical building and the plumber you call in an emergency, IT covers the gamut of digital problem-solving. Among the roles an IT team can perform, whether internally or externally addressed, are:

• Strategic planning — defining technology goals aligned with business direction
• Incident-response planning — preparing documented procedures for breaches, outages and ransomware events
• Network structure, including cloud-integration — designing and maintaining the infrastructure that connects devices, users and the internet
• Managing backups — ensuring data is regularly copied and recoverable
• Managing disaster recovery — restoring full operations after a major failure
• Monitoring — tracking uptime, performance, endpoint health and threat activity in real time
• Patching — keeping operating systems and software updated to close security vulnerabilities
• Email systems
• Physical computing maintenance — servicing hardware including desktops, servers and peripherals
• Vendor and software management — overseeing licenses, renewals and SaaS subscriptions
• User management — handling onboarding, offboarding, access controls and permissions
• Cybersecurity — protecting systems, networks and data from threats
• Help desk and end-user support — resolving day-to-day tech issues
• Compliance — maintaining adherence to regulatory requirements such as CMMC or PCI-DSS
• Cloud infrastructure management — deploying and maintaining cloud-based services and storage

A four-question worksheet

Knowing which path fits – internal, hybrid or external IT – starts with a look at your current setup. The following four questions are meant to help you answer for yourself where your organization’s at and which IT infrastructure and maintenance path makes the most sense for you. Your answers are not submitted or collected.