Related Posts
Technology plays a major role in ensuring that the operations for both the small and mid-scale businesses are running properly. But according to the industry experts, small businesses often struggle with technology, as their IT service management plans often get undermined in the face of rapid growth.
When small businesses grow, the demand rises significantly, and the business owners have to make major decisions. And that’s the exact point where further growth or downfall is decided by the decisions made.
Wondering how to prepare for them? Read this post that shares about the 4 critical IT blunders that small business owners usually make during their transformation period.
I’ll start here because it’s the most obvious one on the list and also the most ignored. Small and mid-sized businesses get affected by cyberattacks each day.
CISA actually has a solid resource on cybersecurity best practices that’s targeted at exactly these kinds of businesses. It’s not the blinding government-speak you’d expect. Worth bookmarking, at minimum. But the real issue isn’t a lack of current information.
It’s that security keeps getting lower in the rankings because it doesn’t feel urgent until it is. A friend of mine nearly lost her entire client database to a fraud attack last year. She’d been meaning to set up multi-factor authentication for months. Months.
So here’s something that surprised me when I first looked into it. The per-minute cost of system downtime, even for smaller businesses, is genuinely significant. Atlassian did a pretty thorough analysis on what downtime actually costs and the numbers aren’t abstract.
Lost sales, idle employees, recovery hours, and customer trust. It compounds. And yet. Most growing companies have almost no plan for when things go down. None. Not a bad plan, not an outdated plan. No plan.
I get why. Making an incident solution document isn’t the most interesting work, and when everything’s going fine, it feels pointless. But I’ve seen teams lose entire days to interruptions that could’ve been fixed in a couple of hours if they had just listed the basics ahead of time.
Who has access to what? Which systems depend on which. Who to call first. That sort of thing. Not glamorous. Incredibly useful when everything’s on fire.
Look, I’m not going to tell you every business needs to go all-in on cloud infrastructure. That’s an oversimplification and it depends on so many factors.
But what I will say is that a lot of companies end up in this halfway state where some things are local, some things are in the cloud, and nobody made a deliberate decision about any of it.
The security implications alone are worth thinking about. There’s a useful piece on how cloud migration affects data security that covers the basics pretty well.
I talked to one business owner who resisted cloud migration for years because she didn’t trust it. Good enough, honestly. But her initial setup had no secondary storage, no planned backups, and the one person who saw how it worked had just given notice. So, pick your risk, I guess.
This might just be me, but I think the root of most of these problems is how companies frame technology internally. It’s a cost. Something to minimize. Keep the lights on, don’t spend too much, move on.
That framing made more sense fifteen years ago. Now? Your technology setup determines how fast people can collaborate, how secure customer data is, how quickly you can onboard someone new, how resilient you are when something unexpected happens. That’s not overhead. That’s capacity.
The shift I’ve seen in companies that get this right is pretty simple. Leadership starts asking “is our tech helping us grow?” instead of “how do we spend less on IT?” Different question. Completely different set of answers.
Anyway. None of this is revolutionary. I realize that. But if you’re running a growing business and a couple of these hit close to home, maybe don’t wait for the next outage or security scare to start thinking about it. The catch-up game is always more expensive than getting ahead of it would’ve been.
IT maintenance is an aspect of the business that needs to be kept in a state that can be upgraded fast when required. The businesses that continue to stay with the traditional tactics often fail to align with the rising needs.
Moreover, the security aspects, unsettled infrastructure, and no downtime plan become the major reasons for blunders that are regretted later. Also, when the overall costs add up, the costs of replacing the hardware become overwhelming.
In the end, the businesses that are well prepared for these upcoming problems often experience significant growth.
