Tips for organizing IT in small business
Most of the people who decided to start their own small business often face the same problems in the field of IT. In this article, I would like to give practical advice on how to solve basic problems and avoid common mistakes. Based on our own experience, for our small business in our country, as a rule, several characteristics are peculiar: these are extremely limited budgets for IT infrastructure and no need for high availability of IT services (requirements for reliability of five nines small business almost never exposes).
We turn to specific things that will help start-up small companies to get the most out of modern information technologies with minimal financial investments.
When choosing an automated workplace, I would like to advise you not to use stationary personal computers, but mobile laptops. With the fact that today prices for devices with comparable configurations do not differ much, the use of mobile laptops gives you the opportunity to get several advantages at once.
First of all, what is very important for many of us is the presence of a battery in a laptop, which ensures trouble-free operation in the event of a power failure, and also saves from information loss during sharp jumps in the power supply network. If you choose a desktop computer, then you will need to find a UPS for it, which in fact only allows you to safely turn off the computer when the power is turned off. About how to work for hours from UPS speech and can not be.
Secondly, laptops allow employees of the organization to be mobile, not tied to one place. In a small business, often, each employee combines several roles and performs many tasks, and having a laptop at hand an employee's mobility increases significantly, and, consequently, productivity increases.
Networking of automated workplaces in a company is an extremely important question, but at the same time it can be very costly. For a start-up company with limited financial capabilities, it is most likely that it will not be possible to get a full-fledged high-quality SCS at its disposal. But, fortunately, it is possible to do much less, having received an excellent network for communication of working computers with each other.
The use of WiFi 802.11n technology makes it possible to achieve high communication speeds via office wireless Internet, and wireless equipment like Ubiquiti allows for little money, compared to serious wireless corporate solutions, to build a seamless Wi-Fi network for 20-30 subscribers stably working as in local network and the Internet.
As routers and switches, I recommend to pay attention to the equipment Mikrotik, which organizes a network with a stable routing, VPN and QoS services for tens and hundreds of dollars. Previously, such solutions were not available to small organizations, for this it was required to lay out thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars. Here I would like to focus on QoS, this is what can be used to limit the Internet bandwidth for each user so that all employees can fully use these resources without interfering with each other.
Installing and maintaining a corporate e-mail server for most small companies is extremely problematic and requires disproportionate costs for hiring IT specialists of the appropriate level, as well as hardware and software.
Fortunately, for them, there are free corporate mail services from Yandex, as well as Google’s paid service for a relatively small amount. So, having redirected mail services to the Yandex zone of your domain to Yandex servers, you get a fully functioning corporate cloud mail server with anti-spam and cyber-attacks protection functions. All your employees will use mailboxes with the name of your domain. E-mail can be used both through the web interface and through e-mail clients on work computers, mobile phones or tablets.
Previously, creating a good corporate web site required quite serious labor for programmers, designers, layout designers, analysts, and code testers. However, to date, the Internet has a large number of free CMS (content management systems), which allow anyone who wants to create their own website at a high level. Say more, in most cases when ordering corporate sites in web studios, they will be created on the same CMS systems. If you have the time and desire to understand how CMS works, then you can build a website for your company and support it in the future. At the same time, it is not necessary to have serious knowledge in programming and design.
Among other content management systems I would like to highlight and advise for novice creators of the site - WordPress. It has a huge number of free themes and plugins, with which you can build a corporate website for almost every taste and functionality. Get used to the admin panel and manage the site will not be easy. At the same time, the CMS itself does not require serious resources from the server where the site will be located.
I see that the main task of the site owner with this approach will be the ability to create content that can be published on the site, and not the work on programming and technical support of the site.
One of the important tasks in IT for any business is the presence of a permanently stable working platform for hosting its services. At a minimum, this is a company website. As a rule, in the modern world, the larger the company, the more various internal IT services should work stably and be accessible from the Internet.
The best solution for start-up companies, I see, is the purchase of a virtual server in one of the data centers that provides such services. For an average of 5 - 10 dollars per month, you will get 2 processor cores and 2-3 GB of RAM on the server, with an unlimited Internet access limit. For example, I will give such hosters as ihor.ru, firstvds.ru, there are also many others that are easily located through Google. Order, pay and get the server can be a few hours. For the website of a small company, such a server is enough for the eyes. It is unlikely that a large number of visitors will go to your site during the first year of the company's life, with these resources being insufficient.
To bother with your dedicated server and additional equipment in the data center for a small company is very expensive and it will be profitable. You can think about this if your products are directly IT services, and you sell them.
Server virtualization technology has long been entered the world of information technology, today at the forefront is the introduction of containerization, but often, many companies do not have sufficient expertise even to use virtual servers.
What are the advantages of virtualization of small businesses. First, by purchasing one physical server, you can run dozens, even in some cases, hundreds of virtual servers. As a rule, the main narrow neck during virtualization is RAM, the cost of which is low today. Perhaps for all your IT needs a single server with a large amount of RAM will suffice, which will allow you to save serious money on hardware. Thus, acquiring a server or a good stationary computer with a large amount of RAM, you actually get dozens of virtual servers.
If you think virtualization software is expensive. In general, of course, you are right, but, for example, VMware has a free ESXi hypervisor, which, with a few limitations, not critical for small businesses, allows you to create a complete virtualization environment. At the same time, you will have an official free licensed software product with lots of virtualization chips.
The question of the need for corporate telephony for a small organization in the modern world is a really interesting question. Having the capabilities of various free instant messengers and other available methods of communication, building your own corporate telephony in a small organization does not carry much added value. However, if you decided to organize an internal telephone connection, the following recommendations will allow you to do this as cheaply as possible and at the same time very efficiently.
First, as a software telephone exchange, use free software such as FreePBX or Asterisk, which today allow you to organize a full-fledged telephone connection with many chips over an IP network. Only because of this can a small business save thousands and tens of thousands of dollars.
Secondly, do not bother with separate telephone sets for employees, but use SIP telephony applications for smartphones. There are lots of such applications, as an example I can cite the 3CX client, which performs its tasks perfectly, at a low cost, which must be paid when installing on the phone.
Thirdly, to connect corporate telephony to the city communication networks via SIP protocol over IP, which will allow to avoid significant expenses on the purchase of equipment and the pulling of individual city telephone lines, as is required when connecting direct physical telephone lines. Telephone operators in Uzbekistan today offer a similar service.
Any business, especially at its start, requires efforts to promote its products and services. For a small start-up company, the use of television advertising or outdoor advertising on billboards is extremely expensive. However, knowledge of marketing technologies on the Internet allows you to start promoting your organization without initial investments or with a minimum of investments.
So using a personal blog or corporate page on social networks Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram and other similar sites will allow you to convey information about your products to potential target customers without financial expense, but of course it will require your skills and work to create the necessary content that will tell about your products or services. This is one of the techniques of the so-called "Guerrilla Marketing", which as a whole allows start-up businesses to enter the market with minimal costs.
If you are ready and invest a little money in advertising, then tertiary advertising on Facebook, Instagram or Odnoklassniki can give an excellent return on attracted customers and users of your services. At the same time to promote their products do not have to spend huge money.
Summarizing, all of the above, we can say that modern information technologies allow small businesses, using small financial investments, to solve many tasks highly efficiently. The main thing is the desire to understand these technologies and the availability of free time that you are willing to spend on it.
We turn to specific things that will help start-up small companies to get the most out of modern information technologies with minimal financial investments.
1. Organization of automated workplaces
When choosing an automated workplace, I would like to advise you not to use stationary personal computers, but mobile laptops. With the fact that today prices for devices with comparable configurations do not differ much, the use of mobile laptops gives you the opportunity to get several advantages at once.
First of all, what is very important for many of us is the presence of a battery in a laptop, which ensures trouble-free operation in the event of a power failure, and also saves from information loss during sharp jumps in the power supply network. If you choose a desktop computer, then you will need to find a UPS for it, which in fact only allows you to safely turn off the computer when the power is turned off. About how to work for hours from UPS speech and can not be.
Secondly, laptops allow employees of the organization to be mobile, not tied to one place. In a small business, often, each employee combines several roles and performs many tasks, and having a laptop at hand an employee's mobility increases significantly, and, consequently, productivity increases.
2. Creating a network infrastructure in the office
Networking of automated workplaces in a company is an extremely important question, but at the same time it can be very costly. For a start-up company with limited financial capabilities, it is most likely that it will not be possible to get a full-fledged high-quality SCS at its disposal. But, fortunately, it is possible to do much less, having received an excellent network for communication of working computers with each other.
The use of WiFi 802.11n technology makes it possible to achieve high communication speeds via office wireless Internet, and wireless equipment like Ubiquiti allows for little money, compared to serious wireless corporate solutions, to build a seamless Wi-Fi network for 20-30 subscribers stably working as in local network and the Internet.
As routers and switches, I recommend to pay attention to the equipment Mikrotik, which organizes a network with a stable routing, VPN and QoS services for tens and hundreds of dollars. Previously, such solutions were not available to small organizations, for this it was required to lay out thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars. Here I would like to focus on QoS, this is what can be used to limit the Internet bandwidth for each user so that all employees can fully use these resources without interfering with each other.
3. Email organization
Installing and maintaining a corporate e-mail server for most small companies is extremely problematic and requires disproportionate costs for hiring IT specialists of the appropriate level, as well as hardware and software.
Fortunately, for them, there are free corporate mail services from Yandex, as well as Google’s paid service for a relatively small amount. So, having redirected mail services to the Yandex zone of your domain to Yandex servers, you get a fully functioning corporate cloud mail server with anti-spam and cyber-attacks protection functions. All your employees will use mailboxes with the name of your domain. E-mail can be used both through the web interface and through e-mail clients on work computers, mobile phones or tablets.
4. Creating a web site
Previously, creating a good corporate web site required quite serious labor for programmers, designers, layout designers, analysts, and code testers. However, to date, the Internet has a large number of free CMS (content management systems), which allow anyone who wants to create their own website at a high level. Say more, in most cases when ordering corporate sites in web studios, they will be created on the same CMS systems. If you have the time and desire to understand how CMS works, then you can build a website for your company and support it in the future. At the same time, it is not necessary to have serious knowledge in programming and design.
Among other content management systems I would like to highlight and advise for novice creators of the site - WordPress. It has a huge number of free themes and plugins, with which you can build a corporate website for almost every taste and functionality. Get used to the admin panel and manage the site will not be easy. At the same time, the CMS itself does not require serious resources from the server where the site will be located.
I see that the main task of the site owner with this approach will be the ability to create content that can be published on the site, and not the work on programming and technical support of the site.
5. Use of hosting services
One of the important tasks in IT for any business is the presence of a permanently stable working platform for hosting its services. At a minimum, this is a company website. As a rule, in the modern world, the larger the company, the more various internal IT services should work stably and be accessible from the Internet.
The best solution for start-up companies, I see, is the purchase of a virtual server in one of the data centers that provides such services. For an average of 5 - 10 dollars per month, you will get 2 processor cores and 2-3 GB of RAM on the server, with an unlimited Internet access limit. For example, I will give such hosters as ihor.ru, firstvds.ru, there are also many others that are easily located through Google. Order, pay and get the server can be a few hours. For the website of a small company, such a server is enough for the eyes. It is unlikely that a large number of visitors will go to your site during the first year of the company's life, with these resources being insufficient.
To bother with your dedicated server and additional equipment in the data center for a small company is very expensive and it will be profitable. You can think about this if your products are directly IT services, and you sell them.
6. Using virtualization on servers
Server virtualization technology has long been entered the world of information technology, today at the forefront is the introduction of containerization, but often, many companies do not have sufficient expertise even to use virtual servers.
What are the advantages of virtualization of small businesses. First, by purchasing one physical server, you can run dozens, even in some cases, hundreds of virtual servers. As a rule, the main narrow neck during virtualization is RAM, the cost of which is low today. Perhaps for all your IT needs a single server with a large amount of RAM will suffice, which will allow you to save serious money on hardware. Thus, acquiring a server or a good stationary computer with a large amount of RAM, you actually get dozens of virtual servers.
If you think virtualization software is expensive. In general, of course, you are right, but, for example, VMware has a free ESXi hypervisor, which, with a few limitations, not critical for small businesses, allows you to create a complete virtualization environment. At the same time, you will have an official free licensed software product with lots of virtualization chips.
7. Organization of corporate telephone communication
The question of the need for corporate telephony for a small organization in the modern world is a really interesting question. Having the capabilities of various free instant messengers and other available methods of communication, building your own corporate telephony in a small organization does not carry much added value. However, if you decided to organize an internal telephone connection, the following recommendations will allow you to do this as cheaply as possible and at the same time very efficiently.
First, as a software telephone exchange, use free software such as FreePBX or Asterisk, which today allow you to organize a full-fledged telephone connection with many chips over an IP network. Only because of this can a small business save thousands and tens of thousands of dollars.
Secondly, do not bother with separate telephone sets for employees, but use SIP telephony applications for smartphones. There are lots of such applications, as an example I can cite the 3CX client, which performs its tasks perfectly, at a low cost, which must be paid when installing on the phone.
Thirdly, to connect corporate telephony to the city communication networks via SIP protocol over IP, which will allow to avoid significant expenses on the purchase of equipment and the pulling of individual city telephone lines, as is required when connecting direct physical telephone lines. Telephone operators in Uzbekistan today offer a similar service.
8. Promotion of your products and services through the Internet
Any business, especially at its start, requires efforts to promote its products and services. For a small start-up company, the use of television advertising or outdoor advertising on billboards is extremely expensive. However, knowledge of marketing technologies on the Internet allows you to start promoting your organization without initial investments or with a minimum of investments.
So using a personal blog or corporate page on social networks Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram and other similar sites will allow you to convey information about your products to potential target customers without financial expense, but of course it will require your skills and work to create the necessary content that will tell about your products or services. This is one of the techniques of the so-called "Guerrilla Marketing", which as a whole allows start-up businesses to enter the market with minimal costs.
If you are ready and invest a little money in advertising, then tertiary advertising on Facebook, Instagram or Odnoklassniki can give an excellent return on attracted customers and users of your services. At the same time to promote their products do not have to spend huge money.
Summary
Summarizing, all of the above, we can say that modern information technologies allow small businesses, using small financial investments, to solve many tasks highly efficiently. The main thing is the desire to understand these technologies and the availability of free time that you are willing to spend on it.