Are you racking up your brains on how to build your startup business? Be it marketing or manufacturing, remember to allocate a bit of your investment for IT infrastructure. A proper IT strategy can be a cost-saving measure in the long term as it helps optimize your daily operations. It also makes your business more efficient and secure.
When you are on a shoestring budget, you might consider postponing setting up your IT infrastructure until a later point when you are making profits. But that approach will cost you more as you need an IT strategy now to help achieve your business goals effectively. Fortunately, there are cost-effective solutions that can help you set up a functional and quality IT infrastructure even on a tight budget. Let us show you how.
When you are unsure of something, it makes sense to educate yourself with the help of relevant experts. The same goes for IT infrastructure. Get in touch with IT consulting experts who can evaluate your needs and present you with cost-effective choices. They can also help you define your IT goals and find optimized ways to achieve them within budget.
Here are some features you may expect your IT infrastructure to help you with:
Furthermore, you should also set your goals regarding uptime, disaster recovery, backup, fault tolerance, and the level of computing resources you would need.
You can also seek help to resize your existing IT infrastructure to help cut operational expenses.
While the simplest of IT infrastructure may suffice your needs, never stop planning for a grander future. As your business grows, your IT infrastructure should also scale up to ensure continued business operations. Look for solutions that allow you to dynamically scale up and down your resource usage to accommodate your changing demand levels.
Technology helps you minimize your manual efforts and optimizes productivity. When you employ automation tools, the investment cost for setting it up gets balanced, resulting in saved time and a boost in productivity. For instance, automating your inventory management can go a long way in minimizing losses made due to incorrect entries, delayed orders, misplaced entries, and so on.
When you run a startup, it can be too expensive for you to invest in physical hardware and state-of-the-art on-premise IT infrastructure. Cloud-based services provide cheaper and more convenient alternatives that will be a perfect solution for your needs. Cloud-based services are scalable, easy to use, and can be deployed in a short time. You can subscribe just to the services you need and pay only as much as you make use of them.
There are three major types of cloud deployment that you can choose based on your needs and budget constraints:
The most expensive and most secure private clouds can be set up with your own customized software and server. While you get the complete freedom to use it as you want to, you will also be solely responsible for the cloud's maintenance and management.
Public cloud services can be subscribed from public cloud vendors and are designed for mass use.
Productivity tools like Office 365 and centralized CRM applications can all be accessed via public clouds. While public cloud services come in various price models, you need to ensure that you carry out the best security practices to keep your data secure in the cloud as it is essentially a shared space.
Companies usually deal with highly sensitive research data and information, which can be risky to place in a public cloud. Hybrid cloud implementation provides a better alternative that allows you to work with both on-premise systems and cloud applications, thereby giving you the power to keep sensitive data restricted to your private systems.
You can use a managed services model and outsource your IT needs to a third-party expert team. This can help you save time and costs on training and setting up your own IT team and avoid the management overhead. You will have to pay a fixed monthly cost that will be way lower than paying for experts hired in-house by choosing to outsource. You can also get additional benefits like 24/7 monitoring and customer support services.
Plan Your IT Budget
Here are some steps you might find helpful when determining how much you need to spend on IT infrastructure.
As you can see, there actually are ways through which a startup can build a comprehensive IT infrastructure on a tight budget. The good news is that iSectra can help. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help you out.