Businesses are constantly chasing their own success. If you did great last year, you need to do better this year. While new products, services, or marketing strategies are always going to be a key element to achieving those goals, one area you absolutely need to invest in and then reinvest in is optimizing your operations.
Only when you continually work to refine your operations can you ensure that your revenue is being converted into healthy profit margins. This means more than cutting costs. It means ensuring that your investments are working harder.
Not sure where to begin? Let’s get started:
Be Proactive with Your Security System
One of the best investments you can make for your business is its security, and no, a reactive system isn’t enough. That’s why you need to invest in a threat hunting ecosystem. This ecosystem will use threat hunting frameworks with tools like managed detection and response, endpoint detection and response, and security information and event management software.
With a full threat hunting approach, you can start testing your security defences, hunt down hidden threats that may already be lying in wait, and even work to better understand a threat down to how it happened, allowing you to better protect your business and prevent a costly breach.
Unify Your System
One of the more comprehensive and, yes, expensive investments you can make in your operations is to unify your data into a single data warehouse and ingest your operational systems into a single enterprise resource planning solution. By unifying your system with these two approaches, you can ensure that one, you are only using the data you need (and, in doing so, reducing those costly data storage costs), and two, ensuring that all your systems can access and use your data more effectively.
The ERP then works to help every solution, including those from different providers, communicate effectively.
Diversify Your Supply Chain
During the pandemic, supply chains were decimated. Today, cybercrime and tariffs mean that supply chains are more at risk than they’ve been in years. If one didn’t convince you that it’s time to diversify your supply chains, then the second or third one will.
Not only should you diversify your supply chain, but you should also establish backup providers. You can also actively work with your direct partners to ensure that they are also following standard data security protocols, so you can avoid a hack on them, impacting your bottom line.
Smart AI Adoption
AI adoption is everywhere, but the smart businesses are also investing in AI governance. This is how you can ensure that the AI tools are as secure as possible and prevent issues like shadow AI, where employees use unauthorized AI tools, from costing your business. AI can absolutely help improve your bottom line, boost productivity, and help your business be more profitable than ever, but it is a new technology and needs to be carefully implemented to see its greatest returns.
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