Why Every Business Needs a Comprehensive IT Health Check
Jun 05, 2025
As a modern business owner, you’ve likely heard of vulnerability scans and network tests. While these tests are important—optimizing cybersecurity and internet capabilities, respectively—they fall short of assessing the IT needs of the whole business. Comprehensive IT testing is designed to fill that gap.
Comprehensive IT “health checkups” are a series of software, hardware, network, and storage system audits designed to optimize a business’ entire IT stack. Similar to preventative medicine—in which a healthy patient is tested and treated to prevent future illnesses—comprehensive tests aim for breadth. By applying stressors to a business’s IT system broadly, IT teams can learn which areas of the IT stack need hotfixes, updates, or rehauls.
When Do I Need an IT Health Checkup?
You shouldn’t wait for a cyberattack or system crash to run a comprehensive IT checkup. As these tests are preventative, it’s important to run them while systems are operating normally. Here’s when you should consider running a comprehensive IT test:
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Your IT Team Schedules a Recurring Testing Date
Similar to the way we receive health checkups after a certain age, best practice is to consistently stress test your systems to find flaws before they do damage. -
You’re Adding a New IT Service
If your IT team is looking to add a new product or service to your stack, a comprehensive test will allow your teams to find system gaps and existing vulnerabilities before the change can misfire current systems. -
You’re Changing an Existing IT Service
If you’re replacing or updating a key layer of your IT infrastructure, running a comprehensive test will reveal the key vulnerabilities and under-optimized systems that have been lurking within your existing stack. For example, if your IT teams are swapping your cloud infrastructure from a public to a hybrid system, a comprehensive IT test could save your business from failing non-negotiables such as compliance regulations or rules of engagement for penetrative testing required by your public cloud provider.
Why Does My Business Need a Comprehensive IT Checkup?
Whether you’re the owner of a small business or a leader at a multinational corporation, an IT health checkup provides key benefits to businesses of all sizes.
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Increase Employee Efficiency
Both in-person and hybrid teams rely on essential IT systems to do their jobs. Imagine you owned a restaurant: if even one of your head chef’s appliances broke down, say an oven, your back-of-house’s ability to cook and run food would slow down significantly. For modern businesses, problems such as slow network connection, crashing tools, login inconsistencies, and malware are all obstacles that keep employees from doing their jobs.
With optimized software, efficient collaboration tools, and safe systems, teams can minimize wasted downtime and focus on their tasks.
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Support Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
When a key IT system goes down, your entire business can grind to a halt. Without a stringent disaster recovery plan and backup system in place, even a simple crash can mean days to weeks of wasted employee downtime and lost client business.
Comprehensive IT checkups put your backup systems to the test, finding vulnerabilities or inefficiencies before they can lead to massive downtimes. Teams can audit data backup schedules, adjusting SOPs to optimize business continuity in the event of a major disruption. These checkups can also identify weak points in your security or backup systems, highlighting the cracks that, if acted upon, can prevent disruptions from happening in the first place.
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Detect Cyberthreats Early
In the age of generative AI, cyberthreats are evolving faster than ever. Cybercriminals are using these tools to create more malware and scams with less effort. According to Integrity360, reported phishing scams have increased by 1,265% since 2022. A comprehensive IT test makes for a strong first line of defense against bad actors.
Cybercrime is broad, perfect for the breadth of the comprehensive test. IT teams can take the pulse on general software vulnerabilities, firewalls, antivirus programs, and current employee practices. By checking in on these important entry points, IT checkups help highlight today’s threats so teams can better prepare their defenses and safeguard critical data.
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Ensure Compliance
Specific industries require businesses to follow strict compliance guidelines regarding client data or intra-team communications. If you work in healthcare, finance, government, or a similarly highly-regulated industry, your IT team needs to pay special attention that your systems adhere to regulatory guidelines. These guidelines include HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and, for companies with European clients, GDPR.
A comprehensive test can help your IT teams ensure that current systems are in accordance with these key regulations. The importance here can’t be understated. Following these guidelines can allow businesses to avoid legal penalties, prevent costly data leaks, and create a brand identity of trust in their customers.
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Reduce Unnecessary IT Cost
As companies grow and technologies evolve, it becomes all too easy for IT stacks to stay stuck in the past. Old or ill-fitting technologies can result in unnecessary IT costs, bloated hardware stacks, and inefficient systems. Luckily, a comprehensive IT test can sniff out these inefficiencies.
While running comprehensive checks, IT teams need to compare every finding to the needs of the company as it runs now. If a business’ workforce doubled, will last year’s system support those new people? If your company uses a hybrid cloud structure, do you need to keep paying for the numerous public cloud service subscriptions? By applying this bottom-line thinking to the IT audit, your teams can remove redundant or irrelevant systems to save you money.
Ready to Run a Comprehensive IT Test? Leave It to Us.
At IPM, we take a comprehensive, individualized approach to business IT. With over 20 years of experience as a managed security service and IT provider, we understand that the best work starts with a comprehensive assessment of your current IT systems and needs.
We’re so confident that our managed security services will be of use to your business that we offer a Free Security Assessment to all of our clients.
Interested in assessing your company’s vulnerabilities? Click below.