The idea of people actually setting money on fire is pretty humorous. Watching it happen in real life is less satisfying, wasteful even, so let’s stop doing it with our technology spend! A proper technology roadmap will link your spending to business results on an ongoing basis. We have written extensively about this HERE, HERE, and HERE! The process of putting a technology roadmap in place requires a solid partner, and some amount of time to implement. This means your money continues to burn for no reason. Here are three areas where you can quickly put the fire out of your technology spend.

Auditors not Consultants

The amount of box-checking and reporting needed to meet compliance standards is increasing, but that does not mean you are more secure! Like death and taxes, compliance audits are a fact of (business) life, how you go about staying compliant is up to you. Finding a solid audit partner with a common sense approach is critical. Notice we are using the term auditor, as opposed to consultant.

What we find with consultants is their motivation is (generally) to drive some type of ongoing engagement or project work based on their findings. The problem here is that there is no alignment with your goal of being ACTUALLY secure and compliant, and their need to have “something” to be working on. Ensure your technology partner is implementing security best practices, have your auditor review, and move forward. Some of the most insecure groups we have come across had outside security “consultants”…don’t fall into that trap.

3rd Party Security Add-Ons

The Microsoft 365 platform has constantly evolved from a security perspective. They now offer a myriad of additional security services that will enhance the security of your business. Many of these services were either 3rd party companies that were purchased and rolled into M365 or simply developed in-house based off existing (useful) services.

The point is that until you are making optimal use of all the INTEGRATED M365 security services, spending dollars on outside 3rd party services is not a good use of funds. Additionally, there is now a larger security context to manage and yet another “service” point that the bad guys can use to get into your business.

Step one is to make sure you have the basics covered! Then move on to email security. All within a platform you are already using!

Analog or PBX Phone Systems

Any dollars you are spending to maintain a PBX are wasted. Make the switch, voice is now a basic network “service”, not a handset sitting on your desk. And don’t say, well it just works, because that will trigger the complete failure of the system. Then you will find out that parts are either 1)unavailable or 2)the cost of a small car. Port your phone numbers over to a VoIP provider like RingCentral and move forward!