Growing with Technology

By Brad Marshall



There was a time when a small business could gain a competitive advantage by investing heavily in information technology. Today, a significant IT investment is needed to merely keep up & because, as your business grows, so do the resources needed to support the IT infrastructure, systems and users.

There are nearly a thousand new viruses released on the Internet each month, spam clutters our inboxes, intruders find ways into our networks, our desktop computers are full of adware and spyware & and all of these risks must be dealt with at the same time your staff copes with updates, maintains your critical applications and repairs desktop computers when users mess them up.

Given the enormity of this burden, the creation of a truly effective business continuity and disaster recovery plan gets pushed to the bottom of the list of essential projects. The unpleasant truth is that it's difficult to build and maintain a modern, secure, reliable office computing environment. This is a significant hurdle to overcome when growing a business.



In-House or Outsource?

Whether you build your own support organization or outsource it, the support burden can drain your IT budget and slow growth. It could be worse; without a responsive help desk, users try to solve their own problems and end up creating more ills than they cure. And while they're doing that, guess what they aren't doing & their jobs. Our instincts tell us that something as pervasive as IT infrastructure, i.e., the servers, networks, desktop computers and common business applications, should be easier to keep running smoothly. After all, every business needs IT, just like it needs power, water, and telephones.

When a major piece of business infrastructure ceases to provide competitive advantage and becomes a commodity (just another part of the cost of doing business), it is no longer considered to be a strategic resource and is instead treated as a risk to be managed, as in, "How will we cope with a loss of power, phones or computers?"

In fact, electric power went through the same evolution from strategic advantage to commodity. In the late 1800s American corporations had vice presidents for power and light. It was a time when electricity could provide competitive advantages and a specialized executive's nimble talents were needed. Will there come a time when all businesses view IT as a commodity and do away with chief technology officers? It's possible that time is nearly upon us.

Most small businesses outsource the build-out, support and maintenance of commodity services. It's still normal to locate desktop computers under the users' desks and to put servers in an onsite data center or equipment closet. Support for IT is often provided by a mixture of in-house and outsourced resources.



Desktop Solution

Since Sept. 11, the largest American corporations have been eliminating desktop computers altogether in favor of giving their users access to all their applications, data and services using thin client terminals over broadband connections. Users still see their familiar Windows desktop and have all the functionality they had before, but there is no longer a physical computer at the desk to maintain, become obsolete, get infected with viruses, have e-mail settings changed or have configurations mysteriously altered.

This trend does, in effect, complete the commoditization of IT infrastructure.

All technology is centrally located and administered; users cannot modify the environment or perform unauthorized activities; the environment is reliable, available, secure, virus-free and (nearly) spam free. System and application software is always current and data is now backed up every day. What's more, every component in the data center is redundant, so if a piece of hardware or software fails, another takes over and service continues uninterrupted & there is no single point of failure.

It's expensive to build and maintain an IT infrastructure that achieves this level of excellence. So how can small businesses do it? Well, just as there are service organizations that will build and maintain your onsite technology infrastructure, there are also service providers who will allocate the resources you need for your business in their data centers, where they support hundreds of clients simultaneously on massive servers while guaranteeing the isolation and privacy of all client data. These terminal service providers also supply every desktop with a thin client terminal, typically sporting a 17-inch flat-panel color display, keyboard and mouse.

When you consider that 80% of all help desk calls relate to local desktop PC problems, the terminal service provider model for delivering IT infrastructure has the immediate and real impact of eliminating 80% of all problems.

Growing IT along with your business is easier once IT becomes an outsourced commodity. New users or entire branch offices can be added by plopping thin clients down on desks and having the service provider enable the appropriate number of new accounts.



Fast Disaster Relief

This approach also provides a complete disaster recover capability. If the worst should happen, your staff can be relocated to a new facility that can be set up as fast as thin clients can be taken from their boxes.

When users log on, they are right back where they were when disaster struck, in the same application with the same data, ready for the next keystroke. Why? Because regardless of what happened in the office, their applications kept on running in the data center, waiting for the user to log on from some other location.

The way to the future is already clear to corporate giants: Deliver highly reliable and secure business computing in a terminal service environment and eliminate four-fifths of their maintenance headaches. Even better, small businesses are able to gain access to this technology through service providers.



Brad Marshall heads up the business development team at ConvergentWorks. He can be reached at 410-298-0555 and brad@convergentworks.com.