SMBs have unique IT needs that often fall by the wayside as other business requirements take front and center. However, businesses of all sizes should consider IT strategies that enable them to not only meet current customer demands but position the organization to evolve for years to come.
When considering how to future-proof your SMB customers’ IT strategies, managed service providers (MSPs) should focus on the emerging technology solutions expected to drive the most immediate growth. These include:
- Security – Identify a holistic solution that secures the organization without being overly restrictive.
- Storage – Align storage solutions to scale with the organization.
- Data center – Ensure flexibility that will enable additional services to be incorporated into the data center.
Security Should Go Beyond the Perimeter
Traditional avenues to security largely rely on a perimeter approach, which has a singular goal: Keep the bad guys out and trust everyone inside. While smaller businesses may think this perspective is strong enough to meet their needs, the truth is, it isn’t. Elements of perimeter security such as threat recognition, pattern analysis, and surveillance detection do play a vital role in security infrastructure, but they fail to address the No. 1 threat to security: the negligent employee who doesn’t follow security policies behind the keyboard, not the system itself. This is becoming even more crucial as the continual shift to a permanently hybrid workforce requires organizations to take into account multiple entry points.
A trust-but-verify approach to security helps keep up with today’s speed and style of business. It also enables businesses to remain more agile, while still protecting data and mitigating risk. Further, this approach empowers today’s digital workplace with data-driven managed security services that offer agility and flexibility, and maintain security and data integrity.
Scale Storage for the Future
Cloud storage offers companies significant cost savings and convenience as well as enhanced security and scalable services. Still, many—especially in the SMB space—continue to be tied to their on-prem strategies. Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to storage, and there are benefits to legacy on-prem IT. However, companies must consider not just what works best for their organizations now, but what will benefit their future growth—factoring in everything from their current hybrid or remote work models, to efficiency and ease of use, to the number of entry points. Beyond that, with recent supply chain issues hindering on-prem hardware development, many companies are finally seeing the benefit of a software-based cloud storage solution that can deliver on all their needs.
Encouraging your SMB customers to invest in an efficient storage solution that will grow with them is a crucial step toward digital transformation—and will help position them for future success.
Data Centers Must Offer Flexible Solutions
MSPs know that digital transformation is more than just adopting technologies like security and storage to improve products and processes. It is a holistic journey toward digitizing legacy or analog functions to reap the benefits of scale, automation, and speed in all the relevant tasks. Investment in a future-focused data center—a hybrid model designed with flexibility—will help your SMB customers stay ahead of their competition. Leveraging a flexible data center provides opportunities for cost management, compliance and security, fast provisioning, and agility in the face of consistently changing business needs.
As-a-service models are rising and the data center is no exception, which means SMBs who look into flexible solutions now will be ahead of the game down the road. In doing so, it is important to consider how an organization wants to consume its data center assets. Since SMBs have fewer employees to onboard to a new system than their enterprise counterparts, they are even better positioned to leverage a new data center strategy to spearhead overall digital transformation.
It comes down to this truth: The digital world will continue to evolve, and companies of all sizes and in all industries will have to continuously invest in technology solutions to optimize business operations and remain competitive. A business, regardless of scale, is only as agile as its technology, so encouraging your SMB clients to invest in forward-looking solutions is key to their success—and yours—in this ever-changing landscape.
JONATHAN GROVES is the CEO for Logicalis US, an international IT solution and managed services provider. In this role, he is responsible for the strategic direction and performance of the company, as well as leading the U.S. executive team.
