Hopefully by now, you’ve begun to recognize as a small business owner that modern technology enables you to compete with larger companies in ways that weren’t possible even a few years ago. Over the past several months, we’ve explored an expansive number of IT and telecom solutions available to you, how they work, how they can help your business, and so on. Before wrapping up, let’s quickly review some of these solutions.
Given the complexities involved in moving IT, proper planning and organization can help streamline your office technology relocation; it can keep it from devolving into chaos and unnecessary downtime. Let’s look at a few practical tips to help the process.
If your business grows the way it should, you may encounter some “good problems to have,” including the need to expand into larger facilities. When that day comes, your IT systems must move (and probably expand) with you. How do office technology relocation services work, and what should you expect?
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.
While a hardware-based network security solution like SonicWall can be excellent for protecting your on-site systems, it might not be enough for businesses who work extensively in the cloud. For more comprehensive protection of your network (from cloud to endpoint), Fortinet has developed an integrated product line to protect your business from cyberattacks and hacking.
Despite the large number of companies and developers competing in the network security space these days, many businesses prefer to go with a brand they already know and trust. Cisco has been providing a wide range of IT products and solutions for many years, and its arsenal of cybersecurity products and services is at least as reliable as any in the marketplace.
