Brilliant as the idea might seem, Hardware-as-a-Service is a relatively new concept in the IT community. We’re just now beginning to see more and more companies offer HaaS solutions a way to attract small business customers, as well as keeping their brands competitive. Let’s look at a few examples.
If you’ve been to New York City recently, you’ve probably seen one or more racks of blue bicycles bearing the name Citi Bike. For a small daily or annual fee, you can grab a bicycle from one of many stations throughout the city, ride it around, and drop it off at any other Citi Bike station. (Many other major cities have versions of bike sharing systems, from Paris to Denver.)
As demand increases for more advanced IT solutions for smaller business with limited budgets, developers began looking for ways to optimize resources—to help computer systems and networks operate more efficiently, upgrade more easily and so forth. The answers to these demands have been network storage and network virtualization; both of these empower smaller companies to compete with larger ones, without having to buy a cumbersome amount of hardware and infrastructure or hire a permanent IT staff to manage it.
If you have more than one person working on more than one computer in your company—or if you access company files by more than one device—your computers and devices need to be connected by a network. Think of your network as the software/hardware infrastructure by which your computers access and share company data, as opposed to having some files on one computer and other files on another. Network storage and virtualization are two key elements of your network that help you manage and process large amounts of information in a cost-effective manner.
The need for fax services has frequently been the bane of existence for many small businesses (next to taxes, of course). Fax machines require an extra phone line, require constant maintenance and take up valuable office space—and many smaller companies don’t send or receive enough faxes to justify the expense and hassle. Thankfully, the emergence of online fax has resolved many of these issues for these companies.
