IT Growing Pains in Small Businesses

Article by guest writer, Don Dellion

Adding Flexibility to your IT Infrastructure shouldn't be a "no pain, no gain" scenario.

The harried sound of the administrative assistant on the other end of the line was enough to alert me that this might not be an ordinary call. "Umm, I think there is something wrong here in the office. I have been hearing your calls all morning." Located at the end of a cell phone connected to a new virtual pbx (private branch exchange) server in the office, I asked for more details. She quickly amended her statement to say, "I can actually only hear what the other party is saying, and it is getting annoying."

It worked out that that particular iteration of the software was not capable of operating without the speakers at the local machine engaging simultaneously. The quick answer was to drop the pbx box on top of a virtual platform at a provider's site, utilizing a virtual sound card to process voice calls instead. At the same time, our firm was in the midst of a wholesale changeover to cloud computing and virtualization as a means of becoming more flexible for our user base.

Within a month of changing our messaging and document management infrastructure, there was no data lost. Nor was there data lost after completing our transition to cloud computing for applications and data.

That is not to say that it isn't important for most small businesses to continue to rely on desktop machines and servers as the workhorses in their main and branch offices. Instead, for many small businesses, the opportunity exists now for them to transition part of their infrastructure over to trusted providers in order to increase the flexibility of their IT infrastructure for all of their employees.

Among providers, working with groups like the Dell Enterprise it management might seem like overkill for a smaller firm until you consider that the customization expertise that your smaller business requires is part of their daily routine for internal customers within large corporations that often mirror your organization in terms of size.