Technology changes fast these days. It seems like you have new upgrades every year or two, making it hard for some businesses to keep up with the changes.
However, that isn’t stopping companies from trying. Believe it or not, 53% of businesses plan to increase tech spending during the next year to combat this. The question is, what does it take to upgrade your IT successfully?
Before you start to update your IT equipment, it pays to know how to do it right. Follow the guide below to upgrade equipment in your company without any major problems.
Create a Strategy
Big IT upgrades don’t operate in a vacuum. You’re dealing with complex systems, so you need to do everything possible to ensure everything works right after the upgrade.
If you don’t, you risk causing serious problems and downtime for employees. Create a strategy and procedure for upgrading the equipment at your company. This plan will also include failure scenarios, which gives your team a roadmap to follow when they run into issues.
Test Your Upgrades
You don’t have to buy new equipment and hope it works. You can set up test environments in your IT department and use them to test your upgrades before you roll them out company-wide.
Doing this will help your team look for conflicts during production. You can also get other employees to test the system updates. They may handle things differently than your team, so they can find issues IT employees won’t always find.
Plan for Downtime
Unfortunately, you can’t handle every upgrade in the background. Some systems are mission-critical. When you take them down for upgrades, employees won’t have access to those systems and can’t work.
That’s why it’s critical to handle those upgrades during non-business hours. You want to minimize the upgrade’s impact as much as possible, and doing it during off-hours helps you do that.
Don’t Do Everything at Once
It’s tempting for some IT departments to knock out big system upgrades at once. While doing this is a great way to tackle a big job, it isn’t always the best choice.
Gradually rolling out upgrades helps you control problems. You won’t have issues finding problems since you have a limited number of changes. You may have a slower upgrade process, but it will be more successful and lead to less employee downtime.
Dispose of Previous Equipment
The final step of the upgrade process is to get rid of your old equipment. However, there are ways to do this right.
Electronics, for instance, need to be properly disposed of. You’ll need to find an electronics recycling program to send your old equipment. If your equipment is still good, you can sell it to another company or person.
Hard drives also need to be disposed of properly. Businesses like www.certus.software/en/enterprise-data-erasure/ offers secure file removal to ensure nobody recovers sensitive information from your discarded hard drives.
Don’t Upgrade IT Equipment on a Whim
Your new IT equipment will make a huge impact on your business, but things can go wrong if you upgrade equipment without a plan. You need a system to roll out updates with minimal disruptions and complications. Use the guide above to handle your IT equipment upgrades with success.
Do you want to learn more tips that will help you make the most of your new tech systems? Learn more tech tips by heading back to the blog.
