Tip of the Week: Maintaining Software that Fits Your Business

Businesses use different types of software to fulfill various tasks and functions throughout the workday, but there are certain practices you can implement today that can help you better manage your software solutions. Here are three ways your organization can take better care of its software infrastructure, regardless of industry or business size.

Be Wary of Shadow IT

If you don’t provide employees with the tools they need to do their jobs effectively, they will more often than not go out of their way to find tools themselves. This can lead to unregulated software on your infrastructure that is not monitored or maintained by your business, also known as “shadow IT.” The easiest way to prevent shadow IT from becoming a thing for your business is to make sure your staff have access to all of the solutions they need right from the get-go. This might mean providing them with an entire productivity suite or specialized software based on their role within your organization.

Appropriately Manage Subscriptions

In today’s age of “as a service” offerings, it’s easy to purchase a solution for one project but forget to cancel it when the project is done and over with. These additional subscriptions that are entirely unnecessary can add up if you aren’t paying attention. We recommend that you perform an audit on the regular to ensure that you aren’t paying for services that are not being used on a regular basis.

Apply Patches and Security Updates

Software developers frequently have to issue patches and security updates to their creations to offset the progress made by hackers or to cover up oversights during the initial development cycle. It’s your responsibility to make sure any patches or updates are applied in a timely manner; failing to do so could put your business at risk of security issues down the road.

One way many businesses have managed to successfully keep tabs on their software infrastructure is to implement Software-as-a-Service offerings for the majority of their operations. SaaS helps businesses by providing them with an affordable and scalable infrastructure for their software needs, including an easy way to manage licenses and subscriptions. We also recommend you implement a software management platform that gives you the ability to see, at a glance, all of the applications in use on your infrastructure at any given moment.

SCW can help your organization implement any SaaS offering or software management platform. To learn more about what we can do for your business, reach out to us at (509) 534-1530.