The Importance of Scalability to IT Services

What are your plans as a small business owner? If you’re like most of your peers, it’s a straightforward answer: you want your business to grow. You want to employ more talented members of your community. You want to provide the best possible service to your customers.

Growth carries plenty of risk, and healthy growth requires planning, investment, and moderation. To minimize growing pains you’ll need to consider aspects of your business that might not be everyday concerns right now. IT services are one such concern.

IT Growing Pains

Early on, many small businesses get by with minimal investment in IT services. This may be sustainable in the short term, but continuing to operate with barebones technology isn’t a wise strategy. As you grow your business will become more reliant on people, technology, and data to drive sales, and you’ll quickly build a need for greater technology to support those team members and the increased data.

Trying to do all of this with inadequate technology while trying to manage the various other functions of your business can be a recipe for disaster. Losing track of data or poorly maintaining your digital resources can have practical, legal, and ethical ramifications.

 

One of the main aversions business owners have to investing heavily in IT is that they’ll have to constantly invest more to keep their technology up to date and in keeping with the needs of their business over time. This is a legitimate concern if you take a traditional approach to technology. Fortunately, the growing popularity of managed service providers has made technology simple for growing businesses through one key feature: scalability.

Why Scalability Matters

Traditionally, managers would make major investments in software, hardware, and IT infrastructure to keep up with their business’s growing needs. This will always be the case to one degree or another; there’s no way to get out of buying a new computer when you hire a new employee.

For most of your upsizing needs, however, you can eliminate most concerns by considering software as a service (SaaS) and hardware as a service (HaaS). When you work with a managed service provider, most aspects of your network can be scaled up or down to fit your needs at a moment’s notice.

Let’s take a look at scalability in the context of your business phone system. If you hire five new employees, you’ll need to equip their workspace with phones. First, you’ll have to invest in hardware in the form of handsets. Then you’ll have to deal with the phone company, which will likely overcharge you and force you to sign up for more coverage than you actually need. This model results in a lot of waste and inferior service. There’s very little scalability, and it will show in your workflows and balance sheet.

If your business has a VoIP system managed by an IT services provider like PRO OnCall, scalable service will make upsizing your phone needs a breeze. You’ll still have to invest in new handsets, but the hardware will be designed to work flawlessly with your current system. You’ll be able to scale up your service to fit your exact needs rather than wasting money on a plan that wasn’t designed with your growth in mind.

Scalable Service for Your Business

This scalability is a feature of nearly every managed IT service. Stop looking at IT services as a money sink and embrace the future of business technology as a service. It may surprise you how quickly you can turn your old growing pains into new competitive advantages. Feel free to reach out to the PRO OnCall team to discuss what we can do for your business.