Backup and Recovery – The SMB IT Dilemma

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Just like larger companies, small and medium businesses (SMBs) and organizations depend on information technology (IT) to help them succeed in an ever-changing world.

Just like larger companies, small and medium businesses (SMBs) and organizations depend on information technology (IT) to help them succeed in an ever-changing world. Whether youre running a small legal firm or a midsize construction company, you know that business performance is increasingly tied to your ability to keep IT systems operating at peak efficiency.

But for organizations with limited or no full-time IT personnel, IT management and maintenance can be a difficult job. Routine system monitoring and maintenance can eat up time and resources that could be better used to help run the business more efficiently and make it more competitive. And when something does go wrong, it can be a nightmare as employees cant get their jobs done, customers cant get service, orders cant be processed and supplies cant be ordered.

Managed services let you off load routine, yet vital IT infrastructure monitoring and management functions so that you can concentrate on y

our business. Managed service providers can function as an extension of your business, providing proactive services that help prevent problems before they happen, and fix them quickly and effectively when they do happen thus minimizing the impact on business operations.

The dilemma that businesses and organizations face today is that as dependence on IT grows; staffing, budgets and resources cant keep-up pace. That is why a growing number of companies are turning to managed services providers.

Through this article, we are going to discuss the experiences of specific customers, why theyve chosen managed services, and how Dell Managed Services has provided them with a better environment to run their businesses efficiently.

Most of the enterprises understand the value of IT, and know that the right IT solutions are critical to streamline operations and processes, improve communication and collaboration, and better serve customers and employees.

Especially, in tough economic times, SMBs need technology to help compete effectively against the big guys. Consequently, its not surprising that most analyst firms forecast that SMB adoption of new IT solutions and services is growing at a faster rate than in large enterprises.

For many SMBs, keeping up with everything that needs to be donebackups, software patches, security can become problematic. To keep things running smoothly, they need to spend the majority of your time taking care of routine IT monitoring and maintenance, leaving little time for more strategic IT projects to support business initiatives. If you fall behind in these, odds are youll face an IT outage or another problem down the road.

Tom Peters, IT Manager, Salesian Missions, a non-profit organization, faced this dilemma. Before deploying managed services, Tom said, I would say that probably 25% to 35% of my time was spent managing the server rack, and keeping up with maintenance on

the server rack. I also spent too much time putting fires out. Now, I have the time to look at our spam filter solution, our internet providers, phone system providers, and implement a voice over IP (VoIP) solutionand just a whole range of other things that we can start improving on right now.

When things go wrong, it can be a nightmare. The business and almost everyone in it relies on IT systems to function properly. When a server goes down unexpectedly or a network is unavailable for even a short period of time, it can result in a substantial revenue loss to a business. While it can be hard to quantify, think about the potential loss of productivity, sales and customer satisfaction that can result from having your email system, customer relationship management (CRM) system, financial application or Web site unavailable. The level of risk and the potential business damage increases exponentially the longer these systems are unavailable.

At HB Meats and H

offbrau Steaks, If a server goes down, it ruins our day, states Aron Fogiel, general partner and president. The company operates a meat company and five restaurants in the Dallas, Texas area. When a server goes down, or there is an issue with the server, it shuts us down. It shuts down the companywe cant scan products in the cutting room in and out of inventory. From the standpoint of accounting for both the meat and restaurant groups, we need to input information every day. If we lose a day, productivity is shot. Its important that we keep the hardware and software operating, identify and prevent problems before they cause serious issues, and fix them in a timely fashion.

As requirements for more sophisticated applications and infrastructure grow, SMBs also need to support a more complex mix of different operating systems, servers and desktops. More SMBs are also adopting more advanced technologies such as virtualization to help reduce IT costs.

Companie

s with small or non-existent IT staff struggle to keep up with the management of these increasingly complex systems, leaving the door open to outages, security threats, data loss and the negative impact that these issues can have on the business. This is the dilemma that GetLegal.com faced. Managing the IT infrastructure began overwhelming the companys two-man IT team, leaving them little time to concentrate on supporting the companys growth strategy.

With all the different operating systems, applications, and hardware, it was very difficult to troubleshoot problems, said Charles Strawn, manager of information systems, at GetLegal.com. We werent able to monitor the network at a granular level. It was hard to diagnose what was wrong.

IT is becoming more complex, and SMBs will continue to become more reliant on IT-based solutions to compete effectively in todays demanding business climate. As the market evolves, its crucial to keep your IT infrastructure up

and running. You your business cant afford revenue, profitability, productivity loss, etc. due to unnecessary downtime.

Given limited IT staff and budgets, you need to make wise decisions as to what you can do best yourself, and when experienced, expert third-parties can do a better job. By offloading routine maintenance and IT trouble-shooting solving to a trusted managed services provider, many SMBs can reap more value from their IT investments, and focus on making their businesses more successful.

Authors Profile:

Satyen Vyas is the Director, Advanced Systems Group, SMB, Dell India. Prior to this he was Promoter and Director, Vitage, player in the Indian IT Infrastructure space. He is an alumni of IIM Bangalore.