Have you ever wondered just how secure your IT systems are? Or whether your technology is truly working for you? For many businesses, those regular IT meetings with their provider can feel like guesswork. You get a flood of technical findings, a list of recommendations, and a vague sense that you’re better off…but no real clarity about what matters most.
But the truth is, the problem isn’t really the meeting. It’s the outdated, manual processes behind it: the hours of slow checklist-based reviews, the incomplete data, and the lack of real-time visibility. If the foundation needs work, it’s no wonder the conversation feels unclear.
At Leverage IT, we’ve rethought that foundation from the ground up. We’ve evolved our best practice alignment process to deliver better security, better visibility for smarter decisions, and more tailored advice to maximize your return on your IT investment. Below, we’ll share five new changes we’ve implemented and how they benefit your business. But first, let’s quickly take a look at how the old process worked and why we knew it had to evolve.
From Manual Checks to Smarter, Faster Testing
Traditional IT assessments often rely on slow, manual checklists. They take time, they tie up engineers, and by the time the results come back, the threat landscape may have already shifted.
In our old process, engineers manually logged into our clients’ Microsoft 365, Active Directory, Exchange, and other platforms, checking that their settings matched our best practices. It worked, but it was time-consuming and limited how much we could realistically check in a given window. So, we overhauled it.
Now, our best practice alignment process is powered primarily by our advanced network and system inspection tools, which automatically scan across your cloud and on-premise environments. They run in the background and pick up on hundreds of key data points while your team keeps working, uninterrupted.
The result? More insights and faster detection of risks that matter.
5 Updates to Our Best Practice Alignment Process (And How They Make Your Business Stronger)
To give you a clearer picture of the improvements we’ve made, here’s a closer look at the five major updates we’ve made to our best practice alignment process and how each one helps strengthen and protect your business.
1. Expanded Security Testing Across Cloud, On-Premise, and More
To provide you the best security, we wanted to go above and beyond what most IT partners typically offer. That’s why we rebuilt our best practice alignment process to provide you more comprehensive testing and security. We trimmed the less relevant manual standards (standards are the key security settings and policies your systems are checked against) and added 316 high-value automated checks from Network Detective Pro. This has expanded our total coverage to around 466 standards.
Now, we’re able to deliver expanded security posture testing across your IT network, performing deeper security checks for:
- Microsoft 365 and Azure configurations, including Microsoft Secure Score integration
- Your on-premise Active Directory and broader network infrastructure
- Endpoint protection
- Exchange environment details
- Web filtering capabilities
- Dark web scans to catch stolen credentials (like passwords and usernames) before they’re used
And unlike most tools, this system doesn’t just flag settings—it connects the dots. If a password’s been leaked online but hasn’t been changed inside your system? We’ll find it and flag it automatically.
How This Benefits You: With deeper, smarter testing across your entire IT network, you gain more comprehensive security to protect your business.
2. Automated Data Collection for Stronger Security
If you want to stay ahead of IT risks, you need to have current, reliable data—but traditional manual data collection could only capture so much. We wanted to change that.
As part of our regular assessments, we now deploy lightweight automated collectors installed at client sites to run monthly automated scans in the background. This gives us fresher, more in depth insights and helps us spot new vulnerabilities or other potential security issues before they cause problems.
How This Benefits You: You get continuous, state of the art security without interruption. Our automated background monitoring ensures your systems are checked regularly, risks are caught earlier, and your business keeps running smoothly—all without you lifting a finger.
3. Integration That Drives Smarter IT Decisions
You can have the best data in the world, but if it’s disorganized, late, or stuck in someone’s inbox, it’s useless. And if you’ve ever had an IT partner deliver a report a week late, missing context, or full of half-baked insights, you know how frustrating that feels.
To ensure you get the highest quality data, we’ve automated the entire delivery pipeline. Today, once our assessments run, results are delivered straight into IT Glue, our centralized IT documentation and reporting platform. Everything’s already organized and formatted. No manual compiling or delay.
That means when it’s time to review your IT health, our team already has a real-time snapshot of what’s working and what needs attention.
How This Benefits You: You get clean, current insights delivered automatically and ready to act on. With everything organized in real-time, you can make faster, smarter IT decisions about your budget or your technology priorities without delay.
4. Deeper Analysis, Smarter Conversations
Recurring IT reviews are essential. But they’re only valuable if they spark real clarity and action. We’ve taken steps to make our reviews more focused, action-driven, and aligned with your business goals.
By automating the data collection process, we’ve freed our best practice alignment engineers to spend their time where it matters: reviewing the findings alongside your business technology consultant before each meeting.
Today, every issue we flag is scored by risk weight, so we’re not just listing problems. We’re ranking them based on real-world impact. And when we spot something that needs attention, we don’t just say, “Hey, this is broken.” We lay out what’s wrong, why it matters, and how to fix it—all inside a consolidated, client-friendly risk report.
The result? Your recurring meetings are now meaningful conversations about making real improvements to your IT environment: targeted, prioritized, and business-driven.
How This Benefits You: You walk away from every advisement session with a clear, prioritized action plan to strengthen your IT environment—saving you time, money, and headaches.
5. Advisement That’s Tailored to Your Risk Profile
Not every business faces the same risks. Yet too often, IT advice sounds like it’s coming off an assembly line: one-size-fits-all checklists that don’t reflect your unique environment, priorities, or growth plans. That’s not how we operate at Leverage IT. In fact, our advice is now more tailored than ever.
Using our new consolidated risk report, we now visualize your risk across different categories, such as cloud security, endpoint protection, backup strategies, and more. Each category has a clear score, backed by weighted risk calculations, making it easy for you to spot where you’re strong and where high-risk areas need targeted improvement.
Even better, we track your progress over time. In every advisement session, we report whether your alignment scores are improving, holding steady, or slipping—and we help you understand why. These scores integrate directly into our MyIT Process platform, so we can align your technology improvements with your broader business goals.
Our goal isn’t just to give you another set of numbers. It’s to have smarter, richer conversations with you that are truly tailored to your real-world situation and help you steadily lower your risk, quarter after quarter.
How This Benefits You: You’re not stuck with generic IT advice. You get customized, data-driven insights that fit your business’s risk profile so you can make targeted improvements that actually move the needle.
Real Business Impact You Can Feel
Now that you understand what updates we’ve made, what does this actually mean for your business? With our improved best practice alignment process, the benefits aren’t just technical. They’re tangible:
- Faster detection of hidden vulnerabilities and more comprehensive security
- Smarter prioritization of your IT budget
- Clear progress tracking so you know your investments are paying off
And because engineers now spend less time with manual testing, they have more time to focus on what matters—whether that’s inspecting your physical infrastructure, double-checking your disaster recovery plans, or simply answering the questions that keep you up at night.
It’s not just about fixing problems faster. It’s about helping you run a safer, smoother, more resilient business every single day.
Evolving Standards to Meet Tomorrow’s Threats
The threat landscape doesn’t stand still. Neither do we.
One of the biggest shifts we’ve built into our best practice alignment process is continuous evolution. It’s not a one-and-done set of tests. It’s an ongoing process of refinement, where we’re continually updating, adding, and removing standards as industry best practices change. That means:
- Tuning and refining our risk scoring system as new threats and best practices emerge
- Updating our standards regularly, like replacing outdated practices (e.g., 90-day password resets) with modern security measures like multi-factor authentication (MFA) and conditional access
- Enhancing our advisement tools, including future plans for VCIO University resources and more powerful standards platforms
Our goal is to stay on the cutting edge of security, so you can keep focusing on growing your business, knowing you’re protected from the latest threats.
Ready for a Stronger, Securer, and Smarter IT Foundation?
You shouldn’t have to guess whether your IT is protecting you or wonder if your technology is really pulling its weight. Now, you don’t have to. With more comprehensive security, clearer insights, and advice better tailored to your business, you can move forward with confidence.
Imagine walking into your next advisement session and instantly seeing where you’re strong, where you need to focus, and exactly how your IT investments are paying off. No uncertainty or guesswork. Just clear, smart next steps that protect your business and help it grow.
The best part? You’re not doing it alone. We’re right here, continuously evolving to help you stay a step ahead—today, tomorrow, and beyond. A safer, smoother, more resilient business is within reach, and it starts by taking the first step forward with smarter alignment. We’re excited to keep building it with you.
If you’re ready to turn technology into a true driver of growth, our Navigate Strategy and Consulting service can help. With Navigate, you’ll tap into decades of real-world IT experience, getting advice from experts who know how to turn smart technology choices into real business momentum. The result? Technology stops being just a cost and starts becoming one of your biggest competitive advantages. Contact us today to learn more.