Business Tech No Nos For New SMEs

Starting your own business is a wonderful thing. Entrepreneurship is a noble pursuit and a path trodden only by the brave. After all, entrepreneurs endure great personal and financial sacrifice in order to build their businesses up from nothing. They put their own time, effort and capital into ensuring the success of their business, often at the expense of their leisure time, their work / life balance and whatever tattered shreds of their sanity are left after a long day. In return they get to create jobs, generate wealth and support their local economy. But while all entrepreneurs are hard working and resourceful people, none are infallible, especially when it comes to how they use technology. All entrepreneurs know that an agile approach to technology is important in small business. They all know that in such a densely populated and fiercely competitive marketplace, technology can give their business a leading edge over their competitors. But their lack of technological understanding can lead them to make some boo boos which can cause them to waste money, render their processes less efficient, lose productivity or even damage their enterprise’s reputation…

Failing to embrace the cloud

Many less technically savvy small business owners fail to see how adopting cloud based software application and storage solutions can benefit their business. They opt instead for servers which can be wasteful if the scope and size of their operation doesn’t necessitate them. The beauty of the cloud is that not only can cloud based solutions empower employees to work remotely without negatively impacting productivity, not only does it make for easier collaboration, it can be scaled up or down depending on the needs of your business, so that not a penny of your IT budget is wasted on redundant storage or solutions.

Building from scratch when they can outsource

Lots of entrepreneurs have their own way of doing things into which they like to indoctrinate their employees. And while this is absolutely fine, it can result in an irrational distrust of outsourced companies. This is a shame, because outsourcing IT provision to third party providers like www.xbase.com can save money, time and effort, especially for smaller businesses. Moreover, outsourced service providers will regularly audit your provision to make sure that it’s as conducive to peak productivity as possible.

Failing to backup

Backing up is a security redundancy that’s… pretty far from redundant. It’s no exaggeration to say that failure to backup can cripple your business. All it takes is one accidental deletion, cyber criminal attack or hardware failure for you to lose vital data that could send your whole enterprise into free fall and cause irrevocable damage to your reputation.

Dealing with e-waste irresponsibly

Speaking of your reputation, in an era where consumers are more ethically focused than ever it behoves you to dispose of your e waste and old tech responsibly. Not only can old hard drives be mined for data which could be used against you, business tech is full of plastics, alloys and chemicals that can be harmful to the environment.

It’s your responsibility to ensure that your old tech is disposed of responsibly, lest it wreak enormous damage to your business’ ethical reputation and security.