The National Small Business Association’s recent Small Business Technology Survey found that 98 percent of small business owners agree that it’s important to keep up with new technology – but this can be difficult and expensive if you don’t do it right.
The same survey found that small businesses face many concerns when it comes to their technology. Fifty-two percent rated security issues as their number one technology challenge. Fifty-one percent saw upgrade costs as a significant concern while 49 percent cited maintenance costs as a serious problem.
The aftermath of failure to properly maintain, upgrade, secure, and back up your IT infrastructure can be grim indeed.
And yet, about one-quarter of small-business owners handle tech support for the entire company themselves. 43 percent spent more than two hours a week just on technology problems.
The market for telecommuting and mobile computing is also exploding. Forrester Research projects that, by 2015, over 85% of the workforce will be mobile. And International Data Corporation forecasts that the U.S. alone will add more than 3 million corporate home office households between 2011 and 2015.
Small business owners and employees are especially likely to bring computers on vacation. 75 percent check in daily, and nearly one third do so several times a day.
There is never a good time for computer problems, but encountering them while on the road or during precious leisure time is even more annoying than usual. Thus, small businesses are recognizing the need to provide comprehensive, well-managed support for telecommuters and mobile workers.
In addition, there are direct threats to small businesses’ IT infrastructures. For example, there are the security threats posed by hackers. Many of them realize that small businesses typically lack the technical expertise to properly set up robust security. So, they look at small businesses as easy targets.
Industry experts have found that 80 percent of small businesses that experience a security breach go bankrupt or suffer severe financial losses within two years of being violated. If you don’t think you have the time and expertise to monitor these threats, you need to depend on a trusted technology partner who does. The investment is worth it.
For most small businesses, email consumes a very substantial part of their bandwidth. But, it’s currently estimated that over 90% of all email is spam. When you must download your email to in-house email servers, you’re wasting the bandwidth used by that 90%.
So many businesses are moving to hosted secure email services. By having your email service hosted, you download only the 10% or less of your email load which is legitimate communication.
This frees up additional bandwidth to dramatically improve the speed, quality, and cost effectiveness of your other external communications. And that’s in addition to being able to leverage the top quality virus scanning and spam filtering proficiencies of a capable email hosting service provider.
It’s also critical that small businesses have a current copy of their data stored somewhere safe and accessible. With a purely on-site infrastructure, data is still backed up locally where it is subject to loss in the event of fire or natural disasters.
This is why many small businesses are considering Cloud Computing or an offsite managed service for data backup and disaster recovery. Automatically storing archived data off-site in a secure private cloud keeps data safe but rapidly and easily accessible in the event of disaster.
So key IT issues that small business owners need to address are:
When considering your information technology infrastructure, you really should look at the big picture. Clearly, traditional approaches aren’t working. Should you be focused on keeping your technology running or growing your business? An outside IT provider can be a tremendous asset – freeing you up to give your full attention to your business.
These days, you need an IT service provider who can offer you a broad portfolio of capabilities. It can start with managing, maintaining, and upgrading your internal IT infrastructure. But it should also include offering hosted email and web services as well as Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery.
For those companies that are ready, moving your data and systems entirely to the Cloud can help to reduce costs. It’s highly scalable, universally accessible, and provides for automated backups and upgrades.
These are just some of the reasons why DynaSis, and the range of services it offers to help businesses more profitably manage their IT infrastructures, are so impressive. DynaSis can help you by:
If you’re not already familiar with hosted services and Cloud Computing, you’ll want to read some or all of the other white papers in this series. These explain what these services are and how they work, discuss their benefits, and address concerns you may have.
If you’d like more help understanding these new technologies, give the people at DynaSis a call. They’ll be glad to show you various ways to meet your technology needs.
If your business needs to cut costs while enhancing quality, increase productivity while responding quickly to the needs of your market, all the while ensuring that your systems and data are secure and confidential, DynaSis may be able to provide just the right solution for you. Call them today to find out.
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