"Everything is fine" - is it, really?

I wrote in a previous article about the virtues of “ditching your server” and embracing a server-less environment for small businesses. The benefits are numerous: work data accessible from anywhere you are, world class security, data safely stored and backed up, not having to maintain your own IT infrastructure, lower costs, seamless collaboration between coworkers, and much more.

However, a common refrain I hear from small business owners is “everything is fine as it is now”, “why change what works?”, “we want to stick to what we’re used to” - which essentially boils down to the seven most expensive words in business: “That’s the way we’ve always done it”.

“Everything is working out fine for us now”. Is it, really? Let’s examine this for a moment.

• If you need to access a work file from home at night, or while travelling, can you access it from wherever you are, or do you have to drive into the office to get to it?

• If your work laptop crashed with no chance of recovering its data, would you be able to easily get that data back?

• A decent server costs $3-5K, which you have to replace every 3-5 years (IF you follow recommended refresh cycles). Servers require constant maintenance, which costs time and money. The process of replacing a server is an expensive and time consuming task. Rinse and repeat every few years...forever. It’s an expensive, nerve-wracking, never ending treadmill.
• You can’t access work data from your smartphone while on the go.
• Can multiple coworkers easily collaborate on a single document, or do multiple copies get passed around in different states of completion, which then results in some unlucky soul having to piece together multiple revisions like a jigsaw puzzle?

Does all this sound like “everything is fine”? I hardly think so.

The fact of the matter is most small businesses are running on a turn of the century model. Cloud computing solutions did not exist then, and all work was performed on PC’s in the office which all connected to a central server. There were no smartphones or tablets which enabled us to access incredible computing resources wherever we traveled.

Mobility wasn’t a concern because everyone did their work while in the office, and was finished when they went home for the day. If you’re the owner of a small business, does your work stop when you leave the office at 5pm? I didn’t think so.

What we have as a result is a 15 year old model which has had band-aid after band-aid applied to it to try to make it viable in today’s mobile, collaborative world that previously did not exist. It’s an expensive, single point of failure that requires extensive maintenance, complicated backup methods, lots (and I mean LOTS) of time and money, and lacks the flexibility needed for today’s mobile environment. This is not “fine”. It’s Stockholm Syndrome, with the server acting as the captor.

Take that band-aid off and get off of the expensive, time consuming, and never-ending treadmill! There’s a much better way to run a small business today that does not require expensive servers and all the pitfalls that come with them.

Stop being satisfied with “fine” when you could be “great!” instead. Let us show you how.

Matthew is the owner of Small Cloud Tech, helping Kansas City small businesses modernize their businesses using cloud based solutions, bringing enterprise grade technology solutions to that are high value, low cost, and low maintenance.