intelligent

AN OUTAGE IS PAINFUL AND EXPENSIVE – POTENTIALLY

COSTING THOUSANDS PER MINUTE OF DOWNTIME AND FURTHER

IMPACTING INTANGIBLES

LIKE LONG- TERM BRAND REPUTATION .

Doing so would inevitably result in significant issues that could seriously compromise an organisation ’ s ability to conduct business successfully and safely .

Most SMEs know that avoiding an IT investment now may save them a bit today but will likely end up costing them a lot more in the long run . But , without an enterprisesized IT department and budget , what ’ s an SME to do ?

My first piece of advice would be for the SME to align with a trusted advisor , such as a consultant , VAR , SI , etc . This is akin to having an enterprise-sized IT department that can assist you with anything from a one-off purchase where they provide design , acquisition , deployment and / or training , to an on-going management and services partnership . Again , while there is certainly an investment that needs to be made in such a relationship , the IT and business benefits , as well as the IT technology investment cost savings , makes it well worth it .

My next piece of advice is to not underestimate the criticality of technology strategies and technology investments that ensure data and services availability and security . No SME wants to face an outage and manage the fallout during business hours , let alone be woken at 2am to deal with it . An outage is painful and expensive – potentially costing thousands per minute of downtime and further impacting intangibles like long-term brand reputation . Likewise , a security breach can cost hundreds of thousands , even millions – especially when ransomware demands are involved – and a cyberattack can also lead to significant legal and regulatory compliance issues , as well as a hit to brand trust .

SMEs that wish to ensure that their business applications will remain operational no matter what happens should look for a ‘ smart ’ availability solution that enables them to ensure high availability ( HA ) and manage a variety of heterogeneous Windows and Linux workloads at the instance level-as well as Docker containers . SMEs that wish to ensure seamless and secure , Zero Trust access to and sharing of data , from anywhere , at any time should avoid VPNs and instead seek a security solution that enables them to build lightweight , scalable and highly secure connections between on-premises , remote , Edge and / or cloud environments , as well as extend these capabilities to Edge and IoT deployments . �