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 key 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 effective security 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.
Having said that, 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 favorable 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 good 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 are able to 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 Emerge! We have the experience necessary to bring your information technology to the corporate level. Reach out to us at 859-746-1030 to learn more.