Some Ways Small Businesses Can Intelligently Utilize Technology

While small businesses can obviously benefit from technology, they can also bite off more than they can chew, which can result in a dangerous increase in costs. A responsible business owner will avoid this temptation and prioritize the solutions they need over the ones they want, creating profitability and generating capital needed to make other improvements.

Let's examine some of the implementations that can deliver a good return on investment to a small business.

Managed IT Services
For the small or medium-sized business looking for maximum value for their dollar, managed IT is a solid choice. For a comfortable, scaled monthly fee, a managed service provider (MSP) will make sure that an organization's information technology solutions are functional before a problem arises. Additionally, a relationship with an MSP can also provide invaluable access to specialized vendors, allowing you to leverage some of the best solutions available.

One of the largest values that an MSP provides is in the hands-on experience that its technicians have, both on-site and remotely. A business whose solutions aren’t in working order is a business that is hemorrhaging money via downtime, and so it is critical that a business in this situation has the means to resolve and ideally avoid downtime, continuing its productivity and revenue generation.

One of the best benefits to investing in managed IT services is the speed at which you will see a return on that investment. Comparing the cost of an MSP’s services to the variety of costs that these services help you avoid will help to illustrate how much an MSP can help you. How much are you spending on break/fix services, hiring and onboarding an in-house technician, updating and upgrading your hardware and software? All of these expenses can be consolidated and/or terminated with an agreement with an MSP.

Hybrid Cloud
The cloud is developing at an explosive pace; for the business or with particular requirements concerning accessibility and security, a hybrid cloud platform may be the best strategy to leverage this industry-shaking technology. Private clouds, while secure, are expensive to implement and maintain. Public clouds are less costly, but there are some significant concerns among businesses at the idea of fully entrusting critical data to another organization. While the security of such methods is improving, there is an understandable need for control among many business owners that disqualifies the public cloud as a viable option.

The hybrid cloud is the integration of these two halves, combined together to eliminate the downsides while preserving the advantages. This also provides control over an organization's data and applications while allowing the scalability to leverage it as needed. Arguably best of all is the fact that the hybrid cloud can add the productivity that your business needs to increase revenue and profits. These reasons are large contributors to why the hybrid cloud is quickly being considered inevitable for all businesses by numerous industry experts.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
In our current era, nearly every business has a wireless network. This has led, in conjunction with nearly every employee coming to work with a smartphone, to a need to manage the devices that connect to that network. Permitting workers to use their personal devices for work purposes adds great benefits but requires a solution to help eliminate the risks and threats that these devices bring. There are also numerous incidents where inappropriate and shortsighted mobile behaviors on a wireless network have brought problems to a business. This is why you need to take the necessary steps to protect your network through the enforcement of BYOD policies.

A BYOD policy needs to take many aspects into account to be seen as having a worthwhile value to the business. These aspects include how many devices are being brought into the company, the cost of the mobile device management software, the affect that implementing these devices into the workflow has on productivity and collaboration, and more.

Naturally, you should also be mindful that some employees and most of the visitors you receive to the office will see no problem utilizing your business network to access things that aren’t conducive to your business operations, taking up resources that should be used for other things. This is why any BYOD implementation also needs to see to including access control and permissions within its mobile device management policies. This will provide you with benefits from increased efficiency to enhanced security, leading to a potential boost in revenue generation, all the while enjoying the diminished costs that leveraging BYOD provides to your business’ budget.

It’s correct that adding new technology solutions to your business can carry a large price tag with it, but the right solutions can offset that cost with enhanced company operations and reduced security risks. The professionals at Macro Systems have the experience and know-how with IT solutions to ensure that the right solutions are the ones that go into your business, in the right way. For more information about some of the things we can help you to improve in your company’s IT, give us a call at 703-359-9211.