Three Mistakes IT Makes that Could Cost Your Organization Millions

It’s an understatement to say that IT departments are busy. From maintenance to troubleshooting, managing ongoing projects and overseeing resolutions on outages or system failures, there’s often little time for future project planning. However, when details get lost in the shuffle, that’s when costly mistakes happen. These mistakes can carry a heavy price tag, affecting your personal reputation and that of your organization. These are systematic failings that many IT organizations make—often needlessly.

Is Your Growing Data a Growing Problem?

Your data is the lifeblood of your organization. In the information economy, a growing business means an increasing amount of data is transferred between your employees, customers, business partners and vendors. Issues start to arise when your file transfer infrastructure fails to scale with the growing needs of your business. Maybe you have been relying on a legacy system like an FTP server to transfer data, antiquated homegrown scripts, a managed file transfer (MFT) solution or a combination of the three to move your data, however you could be making the following mistakes with your file transfer infrastructure that could cost your organization millions.

Mistake #1: Leaving Legacy Systems in Place

Legacy applications are one of the most difficult issues IT pros face today. A rip-and-replace approach can be expensive and interrupt everyday business. Meanwhile, legacy software or systems can a ripple effect across the organization, causing poor or delayed transfers sensitive, mission-critical data. It can also cause a business to default on service-level agreements that might be directly tied to work with customers or partners. Worse yet, an old application could create unnecessary vulnerabilities for your entire network. For instance, an old application in a dark corner of your organization may not have been updated in years, leaving a glaring opportunity for malicious actors to take advantage of an IT network.

The added costs that often accompany legacy systems are staggering. By some estimates, legacy systems are costing organizations 10-15 percent more per year, just for maintenance alone. Some government agencies are spending 79 percent of their IT budget, or an average of $62 billion annually, just to keep these systems running.

Mistake #2: Not Using the Correct Tools for the Job

The tools you use quickly become the backbone of any successful modern business strategy. Paired with the right team, great business tools will help your company reach its full potential. However, trying to leverage the wrong ones will make it impossible for you to enhance internal productivity and increase ROI. If your tools do not deliver what you need, this is the price you will really pay. IT departments are busy, and your team is pulled in many directions. There’s no question your team is working hard. But are they working smart?

The cost of not having the correct tools in place, like automation for manual business processes, can set your team back significantly. Your team could be wasting hundreds of hours on manual business processes and making costly mistakes that wouldn’t otherwise happen if you could automate some of these processes.

Mistake #3: Letting Compliance Slip by the Wayside

Those working in highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services are well versed in the hoops organizations must jump through to maintain compliance. Ensuring your organization is compliant is an expensive and time consuming process.

Do you know what’s more expensive? Not complying with industry regulations. A study by the Ponemon Institute showed that non-compliance costs organizations more than 2.66 times that of the costs of maintaining compliance. What accounts for this difference? The cost of a breach.

The study showed that the average cost of non-compliance was $9.9 million dollars and this didn’t account for indirect costs such as incarceration of executives, loss of shareholder confidence and damage to the organization’s reputation.