Doing business in the unforgiving commercially competitive world of today is tough, to say the least. Small businesses can only survive and profit with sheer cunning and with the implementation of strategies that boost their capabilities to punch above their weight. Without them, they will be outgunned by the larger and well-established competitors that exist in every trade sector.
Fortunately for them, there are ways they can compete and win. Otherwise, we would have seen all markets cornered and dominated by a handful of corporate entities instead of the millions of small businesses that are started every day and manage to take a considerable bite out of the market share.
One way they do this is by using technology. Small businesses can compete with the big boys by implementing technologies that can give them acute advantages over their competitors. This is particularly true if they own websites and are willing to make good use of the internet. The market offers them hosted technologies they can use to perform tasks on a budget and that would otherwise be costly affairs.
Below we will see some of these technologies:
Cloud Technology as a Whole
The Cloud, as a whole, offers a myriad of solutions that small businesses can utilize to cut their costs while enhancing their performances. Having an IT department with technicians, administrators, developers and programmers is something such businesses simply can’t afford – and that’s not even considering the hardware and overhead that accompanies the whole setup.
Moving data and services to the Cloud cuts costs by creating an advanced IT environment but without the headaches. Data is stored on remote servers that are cared for by hosting providers, security is handled by experts in the industry, housecleaning jobs (like upgrades and backups) are handled by professionals and, in case of failures or interruption of services, there are people on standby to fix and resolve the issues.
These providers have made hosting their bread and butter and know how to run things, thus taking the burden off of their clients who usually want to be left alone to actually run their businesses.
Going into specific applications that can be hosted with providers we get:
Hosted Email Solutions
A business cannot survive without a stable communication platform. Having an email solution that can handle incoming and outgoing messages without lag and in a secure way is critical. Until recently the best way to go about creating such a platform was to stick a server in the server room, install some of the more popular corporate email software on the market on them (Microsoft’s Exchange Server is arguably the most common one used) and get busy monitoring and caring for the whole package.
With the advent of hosted email solutions life became a lot simpler and cheaper for small businesses. Hosting providers take over the running of the mail server and the email and data is stored on their servers. They provide security and guarantee redundancy while allowing the clients to enjoy the advantages of a corporate mail system with a fraction of the costs and almost no effort.
Collaboration on a Global Scale
Software solutions like SharePoint (another Microsoft product) allow for employees to come together to work on projects irrespective of their physical location. They can share documents, move them around hierarchal chains of authority – for approval, release, or just FYI notices, for example – store them for future references and allow search-enabled access for their easy retrieval.
Media Hosting Providers
Media and especially videos are vital tools in marketing strategies. But they require large disk space and are bandwidth-intensive. Hosting these on their own servers would not only be a costly affair for small businesses, it would also be difficult for them to share those media should there be a big demand for them. A few hundred people accessing a single video file would bring everything to a standstill.
Video hosting sites like YouTube and Vimeo are the best choices for these purposes. Business can upload their files on their servers and simply add links or even embed them back on their own sites. No waste of resources, no shabby media performances and no need for them to pay dearly for hard disk and bandwidth.
Hosted PBX Systems
We all remember the days when the sight big cabinets standing in dark corners with cables sticking out of them and heading into every part of a building were everyday occurrences. For a person to make a call on an extension they would need to be physically connected to the PBX system via one of those cables. It was a messy and impractical affair and things got worse whenever a business grew to require more lines installed.
Now, small businesses can have a hosted PBX system installed with much less overhead or infrastructure costs and which result in very high efficiency. The running and maintenance of the system is handled by the service provider and scalability (even on a global scale) is more a matter of digital reconfiguration rather than pulling dusty cables and installing physical communication devices. Performance, reliability, security and ease of use are all drastically improved by a simple move to hosted PBX systems.
Finally, although these technologies were mentioned here to list the advantages of moving to hosted technologies they are by no means exhaustive – that domain grows by the day and new inventions replace old ones at a rapid rate. Businesses should always keep an ear to the ground and stay informed about such technologies that will enhance their performance while cutting their costs.
