A small-to-medium-sized business, by definition, isn’t going to have the same resources that are afforded to enterprise corporations, especially where its IT is concerned. However, this doesn’t mean that the SMB is stuck using sub-par solutions. Here, we’ll review a few critical needs of any business, and the solutions that an SMB can access to meet them.
Security
Of course, any business that hopes to have any success is going to need to have adequate protection to keep its resources safe. The first step to doing so is to evaluate your IT so that you can identify any shortcomings that exist in your infrastructure as it is. An IT risk assessment is an effective way to do so, as it provides insight into where the biggest, riskiest security flaws are. Both enterprise organizations and SMBs can then leverage similar tools to resolve these flaws, including firewalls, antivirus, and multi-factor authentication measures.
With the increased use of cloud service providers in the SMB space, much of this should be attended to by the provider. Any business that leverages the services of a third-party needs to ensure that the third-party is meeting their end of the service-level agreement. If they are, an SMB can find that they can accomplish comparable security as an enterprise could without expending an enterprise-sized portion of their operating budget.
Data Storage
While their budgets put enterprise businesses in a much more favourable position to create an infrastructure that can contend with their operational needs, this is not to say that SMBs are left without any options. Any suitable data storage solution will perform well based on a few benchmarks: how well it works, how often it works, how easily it can be accessed, and how easily its contents can be searched.
The enterprise business has quite a few options to leverage, such as data tiering (where data of differing importance is stored on different servers) and higher-performing data storage solutions. If this is starting to sound expensive, it is – but again, thanks to the cloud, SMBs aren’t left without options, either. With scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service being available for a much more affordable rate, SMBs can leverage the advanced tools that would otherwise only be available to corporate-level businesses.
Interested in leveraging some of these capabilities in your business, or want to find out more? Reach out to the professionals at Compudata! We have the experience necessary to bring your information technology to the corporate level. Reach out to us at 1-855-405-8889 to learn more.