Happy Valentine’s Day! Above IT Oy is celebrating today, as it’s also our official birthday! Our first year of Above IT’s story flew by as if on wings. The first year was filled with a lot of speed and dangerous situations – but also kilos of successes. Above IT Oy has established its position as a partner for IT management. But what does the year that has just begun look like? I’ll tell you more about it in this blog post.
New Winds in IT Management
Looking back, the past year has been a challenging operating environment for all companies, and especially for IT management people. The prevailing time has brought its own challenges to the market, and many IT departments have had to wrestle with their cost structures.
Last year also saw the implementation of cybersecurity requirements brought by the NIS2 directive at the EU level. As a result, administrative information security is here to stay. While a large part of organizations may have relied on technologies until now, the tightened cybersecurity requirements at the EU level are guiding IT departments towards more comprehensive operations and closer cooperation with their organizations’ business management. Understanding of information security and business protection is growing on both sides. Unfortunately, at the time of writing this blog, our home country Finland has still not implemented these new information security directives at the national level.
As company management teams begin to wake up to securing business continuity, the work of IT management with the business becomes even more important. As understanding grows on how to manage IT purposefully and how to monitor IT successes and development, the value of IT in the eyes of the business increases. For this slightly more systematic work, Above IT will offer its own flavors to IT departments in the coming year, from which perhaps even some of the management teams of different companies could draw lessons in the future.
Strength from Microsoft Partnership
The first year has been full of work as we’ve been building our Microsoft partnership towards the first Solution Partner statuses. The partnership with Microsoft brings us strength and also helps us serve our customers even better. Examples of this are various project models supporting us partners, implemented in cooperation with Microsoft for information security and Azure, which we have already implemented admirably.
Our goal has been to achieve Solution Partner status first for Azure Infrastructure, because as a target theme it is particularly close to us – after all, we work very actively with our customers’ Azure clouds. Now we have achieved this level. This also gradually brings us strength as we prepare for the arrival of Microsoft’s data centers in Finland, the foundation work for which is reportedly being started in Kirkkonummi.
Microsoft technologies are at the core of what we do, and we want to ensure the information security, data protection, functionality of knowledge work, and the operation of various business services for our client organizations. For this year, we have painted a total of three first partnership levels to be achieved: Azure Infrastructure, Modern Work, and Security. We’re already rattling the first of these, and we’ll be announcing Solution Partner status changes in more detail in the coming weeks!
Our Customers at the Center
While the first year was spent building our business and productizing our managed cloud services (and partly a bit too quickly) – we started the new year by painting ourselves a strategy to support systematic work. To implement the strategy and support growth, we adopted the OKR (Objectives & Key Results) management model. We are still a small company – the company grew as planned in the fall to the size of four ‘consiglieri’. But as we continue to grow according to our strategy this year, especially to better support your IT departments – it has been clear that we are building our own model of doing things from the start in such a way that it supports the realization of our strategy.
At the center of our strategy are You – Our Customers. Our task is still to make you IT people the valued ‘Don’ and to be the humble ‘consigliere’ ourselves, who helps you enable the realization of your organization’s business goals. Supporting this are our various Interim and managed cloud services that act as your resource.
So as CEO, I gladly welcome this year, as Above IT Oy has started the new year with even clearer planning and more systematic work. May this year become better – especially for you, our customers. And surely the market will soon start to straighten out for everyone towards a new rise!
So once again: Happy Valentine’s Day!
Regards,
consigliere, CEO, co-founder
Above IT Oy
Above IT Oy is a partner and resource for IT departments. For our customers, technology is the fuel of business. The concerns of IT departments are typically very similar to those of old-time mafia bosses, who already had their own ‘consigliere’ back then. As your right hand, the ‘consigliere’ ensures the functionality and continuity of the business and elevates your IT department to the position where it should have always been in the eyes of the organization’s business!