What is an IT Assurance Review and why is it important?

Where IT leaders are juggling to drive innovation while managing complex systems and staying ahead of cyber threats, taking a step back to assess current systems and their ability to serve current and future needs may take a back seat. This may result in system vulnerabilities, slow implementation of new technologies and lack of optimisation.

This is where an IT Assurance Review can help, by evaluating whether your technology aligns with business goals and remains efficient. By regularly assessing IT operations, organisations can uncover hidden vulnerabilities, streamline processes, and pinpoint opportunities for optimisation. These reviews help craft a clear technology roadmap, ensuring your systems are ready to support future growth and success. In this blog, we’ll delve into details on what such a review involves and the key benefits.

What is an IT Assurance Review?

An IT Assurance Review is a comprehensive evaluation process designed to assess the effectiveness, efficiency, and alignment of an organisation’s IT systems and processes with its strategic objectives.

For IT leaders, this review will help ensure that technology investments are driving value and supporting business goals. By assessing areas including IT operations, risk management and cybersecurity, the review will provide a clear picture of how well the organisations’ technology infrastructure is performing.

This insight is crucial for identifying areas for improvement, optimising resource allocation, and enhancing the overall reliability of systems.

As well as assessing how well your IT estate supports your current business operations, it will also review the alignment with your future strategy and objectives, to identify potential technology gaps and opportunities for enhancements.

The review will result in recommendations which will help your organisation to plan its processes and create a technology roadmap that will underpin execution of the business strategy for the next 5-10 years.  

What does a review involve?

An IT Assurance Review will provide a comprehensive evaluation of your business’s current technology and systems. It involves a thorough understanding of your organisation, systems and objectives, identification of current pain points, and an analysis of current IT spend versus budget. By looking at all aspects in detail, companies can make informed decisions about which systems should be retained, improved, or replaced.

Areas of assessment

The review will typically cover the following areas:

Strategy assessment

This will provide a gap analysis between your organisation’s expectations of IT delivery and that which is actually received. This will evaluate factors such as the suitability of technical infrastructure to supporting business objectives, IT capacity, SLAs, IT spend and commercial benchmarking, and incident management.

Security assessment

This will assess your organisation’s security tools, including security software, perimeter security (firewalls), remote access, and protection of IP. The assessment will also review governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) to identify policies that are critical to protecting the business, and where none exist, put plans in place to create them. 

Technical architecture review

The infrastructure will be reviewed for its overall suitability in terms of reliability, scalability, and applicability to your business requirements. Ultimately the purpose of this piece of the assessment is to ensure the technical foundations are in place to enable IT to carry out its services to end users.

This part of the review may be broken into:

• Infrastructure: cloud, devices, SQL, security, licensing, network
• People & process: skills, gap analysis, team structure, IT service management tooling

Post-assessment

The combination of understanding where the business is headed, identifying gaps in processes and procedures, and conducting a deep dive technology review will provide a comprehensive report and set of recommendations to improve IT functionality, build a secure IT environment, and ensure business resilience.

Insights from this review, coupled with best practice and benchmarking data, are instrumental in suggesting the appropriate technology solutions and governance structure for IT systems to support your organisation’s strategy.

A final report will aggregate all findings and provide recommendations for remediation and/or change. Ultimately, the recommendations provided in the final report can serve as a blueprint for strategic IT decisions, aligning your technology with your organisational goals, and setting you up for long-term success.

Interested in conducting an IT Assurance Review for your organisation? Speak to us today.