Small businesses are a bit like a growing family in terms of constantly juggling demands on time and coping with unexpected challenges. Growth is certainly a good thing, but growing too fast without the resources to support it is not a good thing. The National Federation of Independent Business identifies five warning signs that your business is expanding too quickly. The first one cited is that your systems can’t keep up. Product quality and customer service can slip, shipments can lag and invoice processing can fall behind. For business growth to be successful, it needs to be sustainable.

Fortunately, with cloud computing, that’s one less thing to worry about. In fact, moving to the cloud can help you take the pain out of your growth.

As your business expands—whether through increased sales, new products or even acquisitions—you may be adding headcount. New employees need computers, logins, email accounts and access to the software required to do their jobs. IT departments of rapidly growing businesses can be overwhelmed satisfying their needs, resulting in employee frustration, potential security issues and lost productivity. The last thing any business wants is to invest in growth only to see profitability stumble. So, whether you’re adding to the finance, sales or marketing teams, you need to know that getting additional employees up and running can be done quickly, securely and with no loss of productivity.

Grow smartly with the cloud

Cloud computing solutions can make you successful, regardless of when and where your employees work. You’ll be able to easily support telecommuters and those working from a remote office, as well as those bringing their laptops home at night to get the work done.

Adding another office across town or acquiring a business across country will mean more servers and systems to manage in different locations. A cloud-based server and workstation monitoring solution gives you complete visibility into the health and performance of your network, wherever it is.

As you grow, your security needs may become more complex. Again, no worries. With the cloud, you can easily manage and configure antivirus software on all your workstations and servers, confident in the knowledge that your network is protected, all users have the same solution installed and updates and scans are done automatically as you schedule them.

Try the cloud today

GFI Cloud^TM can help support the growth of your business, offering a simple web-based interface for integrated antivirus, asset tracking and network management. Its automated checks and continuous scanning enable you to save time and focus on more strategic, business-building IT initiatives so your growth won’t slow you down.

Visit www.gficloud.com to learn more.

However, if you break it down and take a close look at where the experts see SMBs investing their IT dollars, it’s easy to see how small businesses may be bucking the economic trends to continue making investments in critical solutions, as well as technologies that will enable them to enhance productivity.

First, let’s look at some data.

IDC projects that security technology spending by U.S. SMBs will show strong growth and exceed $5.6 billion by 2015. IDC also predicts that SMB spending on security products is expected to grow almost twice as fast as general IT spending.

The Wall Street Journal reported on a survey of SMBs conducted by CompTIA, a nonprofit advocacy group for the technology industry, which found that a third of the respondents expected to increase their IT budgets by 10 percent or more this year.

Spiceworks, the social network for IT professionals, noted in its State of SMB IT survey for the first half of 2012 that IT budgets grew 6 percent since the start of the year to an average of $152,000. That represents a 15 percent increase over the same time period last year. Spiceworks surveyed 1,498 IT professionals in 100 countries and commented that survey “results also show that SMBs are spending more on technology across the board”.

What technologies are driving this spending?

More and More Employees are Using Personal Technology in the Workplace

BYOD is making significant inroads throughout the business world. A CompTIA online survey of  500 business and IT professionals found that:

“84 percent of those surveyed use their smartphone for light work such as email or web browsing.” The survey also found that “Individuals using tablets have an even wider range of uses, including note-taking, giving presentations and using their tablet as a communications device in lieu of a phone.”

The Spiceworks survey revealed that 75 percent of SMBs currently manage and support the personal devices their employees bring to work, such as iPhones, iPads and Android phones. However, Spiceworks said that SMBs are split on BYOD, with 20 percent embracing the trend completely and 25 percent “claim it’s a headache.”

Clearly, as these devices become more broadly used for work, they need to be secured and managed with the same diligence as our legacy IT systems.

Malicious Attacks on Small Businesses

It’s not just the large enterprises that are getting hacked. SMBs also need to think about preventing system attacks and one of the ways to do that is to consider using a layered security approach to help ensure you’re protected across platforms and communications channels, such as email, web, etc. It’s not just about antivirus anymore. There needs to be increased vigilance around preventing network breaches.

In its report, IDC notes that:

“the six key security product areas—endpoint, messaging, network, web, identity and access management (IAM), and security and vulnerability management (SVM)—will all show strong growth throughout the forecast period.”

SMBs should be thinking about security protection holistically, understanding that there are solutions to help you do that.  SMBs also can leverage security solutions to improve business processes, ensure regulatory and industry compliance and enhance their competitive position.

Do you align security with your strategic business objectives? Whether you are expanding operations, adding new products or services, acquiring other companies, implementing a telecommuting policy, or creating a social media presence, network and system security is critical for success.

Cloud Spending

More and more, SMBs are considering cloud computing as part of their overall technology strategy. Just some of the advantages include potential IT cost savings, higher employee productivity and IT management flexibility. Spiceworks found that cloud services are now used by 48 percent of SMBs, an increase from 28 percent during the first half of last year. It cited web hosting, email hosting, backup, content filtering and application hosting as the top five cloud services now in use by SMBs

What do you think?

Tell us about your IT spending plans. Are you among the SMBs planning to grow your IT spending in security, mobile device management, cloud or elsewhere?

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