3 IT Challenges Small and Medium Business Face

posted by GUEST POST

If you have a small or medium-sized business, having a good IT automation strategy can make a huge impact.

Over the years, We’ve worked with a lot of smaller organizations.  Their challenges seem to fall in these categories:

1. Scalability.  How does your staffing change as the number of computational assets increase?  If you’re like most companies, you want to grow but not increase head count. 

2. Reliability.  Is your IT staff spending too much time fighting fires?  Are the fires getting in the way of forward-moving initiatives?  Are errors and mistakes costing you downtime that exposes you to lost business?  Does it risk your reputation?

3. Compliance.  Good or bad, the powers in Washington will create more regulations.  Whether you process credit cards, handle patient records, deal with people’s financial data, etc.  You probably need to be compliant with some kind of acronym like SOX, HIPPA, etc.  In this economy, with all that needs done, how do you have time to follow it all?

Automation is the answer.  By designing good IT process and then turning that into workflows executed by computers rather than people, you address each of these problems head-on.

1. Scalability.  As you transition your staff from “doers” to “designers”, you allow your organization to grow without growing your workforce.  It’s very much like transitioning from a team of workers who attach bumpers as cars come down an assembly line to a team of workers who program the robot that assembles the bumpers.  In the later case, if you want to make twice as many cars, you need twice as many robots, not twice as many people.  The same is true with IT workflow.  If you have to do a task more than once, create a workflow. 

2. Reliability.  We often joke that the automation solution is the only employee who works 24/7, never makes a mistake and never forgets to do something because they get interrupted by a phone call.  But it absolutely true.  Once your IT process becomes a machine-executed workflow, the number of errors and mistakes will drop significantly.  There will be fewer fires to fight and the automation solution will allow lesser skilled staff to handle more of them – freeing your best people to remain focused on new initiatives.

3. Compliance.  A good automation tool should be designed to encompass the requirements of the various “acronyms” and shepherd you down a path that helps you build and enforce best practices.  Security audits are cheap and easy when you know your tools simply won’t allow anything to occur outside your security policies and provides the audit trails to prove it. 

We're always interested in talking to people about their challenges.  Please don't hesitate to comment and send us questions.

XonaSoftware Support team is made up of a handful of individuals that spend their days working with organizations to solve their most significant IT challenges through the use of automation.