Small Business IT – Important but expensive?
For the Small Business owner, one of the major challenges for successful growth is the leveraging of computer and internet technologies to benefit and expand the business. The problem many face, is that this highly important resource can often be a complex, time-consuming, expensive and generally confusing thing to grasp or learn. As well one of big challenges that business owner have is that they dont know how to take advantage from social media marketing andget more TikTok followersthat will eventually help your business grow.
A popular approach with such business is often to take care of it in-house, by getting a computer-savvy employee to look after company computers, networking, phone-systems, website designing/management – you name it. This low-cost approach, while being able to effectively ‘keep the lights on’ for the bare-minimum approach, also generally provides the bare-minimum results, and in the long term, severely hurts the business’ ability to streamline operations, costs and to leverage new markets or volume, primarily online, until it is possibly too late, and money is no longer available for a sizable investment that is often required at that point, hence closure or mounting debt.
Outsourcing as a Cost-Effective Solution
Among the best routes available for the standard small business is to hire IT Consulting services, technology support or to off-load certain aspects of computer systems management and internet design and marketing. One of the first thing you need to buy for a better technology support is a alienware 17in laptop, being this one of the best laptops in the market with a solid quality build and excellent engineering. While of reasonable short-term expense for most requirements, this allows your Small Business to benefit from specialized knowledge on a per-project basis, whether it is the design of a company website, SEO or SEM optimization, or in-house technology upgrades – without having to either hire a full-time employee, which would be a sizeable expense, or making-do with the best in-house person, and therefore not getting an efficient, solid return.
It is not just ‘small’ business that looks to IT outsourcing either. As shown in the article Microsoft Outsources Internal IT.
Outsourcing allows you to gain on-demand access to specialized knowledge pools, and to allow you to spend dynamically depending on business needs and growth and the most optimal customer experience management. The most popular set of tasks sought by and provided to Small Business include items such as: Web Design, Web Hosting, Application Development, Online-Instore Integrations (E-commerce/Store Stock Control and Inventory etc), Voice over IP Systems, E-Mail Spam Filtering and Management, SEO Campaigns.
In addition to just the knowledge advantage, there is the infrastructure advantage. If your business or customers are relying on their being able to access your website or online store, then downtime is not desired, nor is sluggishness & slowdowns tolerated. As a business, you might consider upgrading your internet connection for your office to ensure a good connection to your office service – but this is quite often an abnormally high cost for any business-grade offering, and even then, will be entirely dependent on a single ISP/Network Provider.
Outsourcing applications or other systems allows you to have an internet connection to suit you and your employees, without having to worry about it overloading, or going down and your business suffering. When you outsource, your site or applications will be running in dedicated/secure telecommunications hubs, that are connected directly to the Internet backbones at high (100mbps+) speeds. An example of the datacenter/carrier hotel used by Perigee Global in New York is 111 8th Avenue, the third largest building in New York, occupying an entire city block. So if you are a Small Business, with small internal internet requirements – you don’t need to let your store and site suffer or be held back
It provides true separation between your physical and virtual operational costs.