Scaling Your Business with IT

Technology has become an essential part of every business, but with it comes the challenge of managing complexity and cost. A scalable office technology strategy minimizes the impact of unnecessary complexity, implements underlying software, infrastructure, and flexible support solutions, views technology as an investment, and seeks to align with best practices as early as possible. 

Eliminate Unnecessary Technology Complexity

Complexity in your network, computer environments, and applications increases overhead, affecting your cost structure and diminishing your productivity, ultimately draining your resources, IT staff, and money. 

Implement Flexible Software, Infrastructure, and Support Systems

Your software, technology infrastructure, and support systems should be as flexible as possible for efficient use of capital and easy scaling. When making decisions, consider mid-to-long-term cost implications and avoid investing in technology that creates friction or hinders scaling. 

View Technology as an Investment

It’s hard to scale a business smoothly without a scalable office technology strategy for your organization. When viewed as an investment to enable maximum productivity, it’s easier to accept the costs of adopting scalable technology aligned with best practices. 

Align with Technology Best Practices 

If you align these strategies and best practices early, scaling technology is more like turning up the volume than pushing a car up a hill.  Adopting best practices as early as possible paves the way for a smoother ride as your organization scales. Putting off the transitions needed to align with best practices creates a growing problem the organization will face in the future when it is more costly to fix.

The Best, Scalable Office Technologies for Each Core Aspect of Your Overall Technology

Now that we’ve addressed the critical elements of a technology strategy that can grow your business let’s investigate how it applies to each aspect of your tech stack.

The Best Scalable Collaboration and Communications Tools

Regarding collaboration and communications, we believe all businesses should adopt either Office 365 or G Suite because they are the most scalable tools. 

Each solution provides a suite of tools for email, instant messaging, collaboration and sharing, and much more. You may layer additional tools around these platforms, but these address at least one core component of your technology needs. These tools allow you to standardize and improve the user experience. Since they are subscription-based, they’re easy to scale up or down. Hence, you only spend what you need without investing in expensive infrastructure and overhead. Additionally, they’re cloud-hosted, reliable, improve standardization, and well-known by tech support vendors. These platforms facilitate lower management costs in addition to reductions in infrastructure spending.  Learn more about Why Businesses Should Use Either Microsoft 365 or G Suite.

The Best, Scalable Voice Communications Systems 

Even in the digital age, every business needs a form of voice communication. The best scalable solution is a cloud phone system (Hosted VoIP) or a Cloud Unified Communications System.  Cloud-based voice communications systems are the fastest to deploy, require little or no capital investment, expand capacity flexibly as needed, and still offer advanced features to improve workflows. They’re also straightforward to deploy for mobile workers or telecommuters across multiple sites. 

Since these solutions transfer the responsibility of managing the core phone system infrastructure in the cloud to the cloud system provider, they reduce infrastructure needs, spending, complexity, and overhead costs of managing voice communications.

The Best, Scalable Line of Business Applications

SaaS applications are scalable solutions for a line of business applications. Hosted by software vendors and sold as flexible subscriptions, reducing internal infrastructure and support costs. Adding users is easy with just licensing and configuration.

Manual information transfer may work early on in a small company. Still, it will scale poorly and lead to costly future mistakes. A scalable approach is to deploy an inter-compatible line of business applications, improving information flow, productivity, and user experience. Learn more about the business benefits of using cloud applications.

The Best Scalable Network and Computing Infrastructure

Business-grade and cloud-managed is the most scalable way to address network and computing infrastructure. Meraki or Ubiquiti networking for firewalls, switches, and wireless is excellent for scaling. It may require more investment upfront. Still, it reduces management overhead and offers an enterprise-grade scalable network, robust management interface, and useful reporting capabilities at a reasonable cost. 

Beyond the network infrastructure, invest in devices for your employees that surpass recommended minimum specifications for their use-case to speed up the user experience, reduce issues, increase productivity, and allow for expanded future use. Learn more about why businesses need computers with minimum specifications & supported operating systems.

For servers and storage needs, stick to the cloud. Maintain supported operating systems, which are much simpler and less costly when you’re in the cloud and commit to a refresh cycle. Learn more about the benefits of using cloud servers & storage.

Computing devices are cheap when you compare them to your payroll. Over time, computers and servers degrade significantly in performance. The slow performance of an old machine directly impacts your employees’ productivity and increases costs. Productivity highly depends on an organization's network, computing infrastructure, and internet connections.  

The Best Scalable Technology Management Strategy 

Outsourcing to a best-in-class managed services provider is hands down the most scalable approach to technology management.

Managed services providers already have scale and efficiency in their operations. They have teams of engineers at your disposal, allowing for greater coverage and continuity, in-house subject matter experts, standardized and refined processes, and scalable management solutions. MSP pricing models often scale flexibly as well. Compare that to having to hire another person every time your existing IT staff hits 110% capacity.  

Building an in-house IT team doesn’t compete with the ability to scale with a Managed Services Provider. Learn more about how a Managed Services Provider can benefit your organization.

Learn More About How Framework IT’s Unique Managed Services Pricing Model Incentives Clients to Adopt Data-Driven Best Practices, Such as Using Cloud Applications!