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When you’re launching your startup, it’s easy to take a lax attitude toward IT. Focus is on getting the product or service to market as quickly as possible. Maybe you’re working from your home office with a couple of remote contractors. Your devices are your personal laptop and phone. You’ve got a patchwork collection of software licenses you already happened to have, and you’ve signed up to a handful of cheap cloud services just to get things going.
Then you expand into a physical office. You hire staff. To save on costs, you adopt a Bring Your Own Device policy to get work done. Some cloud services are free, so that’s how you collaborate. That might be all well and good for a little while, but if you’re worried it’s unsustainable, well, you’re right.
The price of dealing with IT later
If you haven’t considered your IT in a thorough, rigorous way, you have to face the fact that your competition has. Every day that you let go by without pushing your infrastructure toward a modern, efficient solution is a day you fight at a disadvantage.
- You may not know about new technologies and software that could save you hours per day
- You may be subject to compliance issues that carry hefty fines for violations
- The technologies you’re using may be cheap — but they may also be insecure
- Scaling up later will be a lot more expensive than getting it right now
It doesn’t matter if you’re in the very first few stages of getting your company going, it’s never too early to actually consider how your IT infrastructure should look.
Get ahead with the latest technology
You might find yourself getting a lot done with what you’re familiar with. What you may not know is what you stand to be able to accomplish by staying abreast of the latest technologies. From more convenient collaboration, to opportunities for automation, to entirely new consumer-level features, today’s best practices can position your company miles ahead of a competitor who last reviewed their systems two years ago.
If you don’t have the luxury of much physical space or up-to-date computing power, you may also be able to operate entirely on the cloud — and that’ll really let you punch above your weight.
Compliant from day one
You might not be thinking about compliance when all attention is focused on the product. But there are a lot of regulations around IT. Depending on your industry, your sales process, and your geographic location, there may be restrictions on what you can do with data, and requirements on the infrastructure around it.
The last thing you want is to see your product’s growth stagnate or even reverse when a regulator finds your business isn’t doing its due diligence and fines cut into profits.
Even a startup is vulnerable to cyber attack
It’s not just the big multinational companies that attackers target. If they find an insecure company of any size, they’ll try to get in. Not only might they target you specifically, but they’ll also target insecure companies you do business with. That $0 / month cloud storage service won’t be worth that price when you lose both your company and client data.
There are always security issues. You need to make sure that your own systems are safe, and you need to have confidence that services you use are too.
And if you’re a BYOD workplace, you need to be sure all of those devices that are given privileged access can be trusted as well.
Get it right now so the scale up is easy
What’s worse? Getting ten different systems harmonized and working together by tediously taking the best bits of each and manually migrating inconsistent systems and data into the new paradigm but you don’t have to do it until next year?
Or taking a little time now to establish that single best system and simply duplicating or increasing service plans as necessary?
It’s the second one. Not only is the scaling up process intrinsically easier, but you’re getting the compounding benefits of doing it right from the very beginning. Save yourself the headache down the line and position yourself strategically today.
How do you do all this?
We know it’s one thing to say this and another thing to implement it. That’s why we’ve worked to develop a turnkey startup IT Advisory. It’s effective, it’s compliant, it’s secure, and it’s ready for your growth. And to ensure you get the technology advice to manage it all, we’ve got an on-demand CIO service to help you compete without having to hire one full-time.
Give it a look and reach out to us. We think you’ll like what you see.
