Cloud Services
Is your old VPS starting to struggle to cope with the mail server and web applications you are running on it? Are you paying a fortune for a VPS which is only rarely using more than half of its available processing power and memory? If so, you could have a good case for moving to the cloud. With cloud hosting you pay only for what you’re using, so you pay less during the quiet times, and when your utilization spikes the server will allocate more resources to fill the need. Thanks to services such as Microsoft Azure, you can run almost any OS, applications, or development stack in the cloud, making the transition easy.
Bring Your Own Device
This isn’t so much an investment as a philosophy change. If you have a relatively small company, consider giving your employees the freedom to use whatever smartphone, tablet PC or laptop they wish for work purposes. With large companies, the tech support overhead of this sort of philosophy is massive, but for a company with just a few employees it should be perfectly manageable and the benefits are clear. Many people have a strong preference for Android, iOS or Windows 8, and letting them use what they know and love will make them happier and more productive.
VoIP and SIP trunking
Improve the speed and stability of your communications technologies by moving to a VoIP provider that offers SIP trunking. One of the biggest benefits of SIP trunking is that it increases the number of concurrent calls that you can run through a single connection. This can be invaluable for a small but growing business.
Investigate Open Source
Free and open source software offers a huge range of options for small and medium sized businesses. There are open source alternatives for almost every software package today, from open source operating systems and server packages, to email clients, office packages, invoicing and accounting solutions, and more. Next time you need to buy some software, investigate open source offerings first. If they’re not quite ready for prime time yet, all you’ve lost is the bandwidth it took to download them and the time it took to try them out. If you like the package then you will have saved a lot of money. Consider donating some of the money you have saved to the project so that they can cover their server costs for a while longer.
Security
When was the last time you looked at your security systems? Investing in security – both for your physical property and your data, is essential for the future of your business. Good security systems may save you money in the long run in the form of reduced insurance fees. Consider investing in a networked alarm system that will send alerts to your email address and phone number. In addition, make sure that you have a good hardware or software firewall for your network and up-to-date antivirus package installed on all machines
- License: Creative Commons – image source
This post was written by James Harper who writes on subjects relating to business and communications for Maintel the SIP trunking and VoIP experts. Visit their site for further info.
Photo: Vonguard
