Maximising Your IT Options

Today, many SMEs have IT services such as phones and utilities supplied by a third party IT expert. But what will work best for you and what do you need to consider?

If you’re an SME owner, the chances are that some form of hosted IT services will be on the menu for your business in the future. The question is less about whether you will use hosted services than which services you will buy and which you will retain in house.

Hosted services have been around for years and, if your business has a website, chances are you already use someone external to host it. The benefit is one of cost; instead of having to purchase and configure your own web server and ensure it is running 24/7, a hosting specialist does it for a number of businesses. The cost of providing the hardware, server software and applications, and support is spread across a number of businesses.

Many other hosting services work in a similar way where hardware or software is shared between a number of businesses but with each user operating in an environment which is transparent to the other users. If the software requirements are more specialised and complex and if integration with other business applications is required, a shared software solution may be replaced with a dedicated solution. While it is still hosted and may still be hosted on shared hardware, the software is provided for the business' sole use so additional applications can developed which access the data, for example, for use in other business applications.

When a business needs better performance than can be provided by shared hardware, for example, it may purchase a hosted hardware solution dedicated to that business' use. In this case it will no longer share the hardware with others but it will still be using hardware owned and managed by the hosting service.

Own or rent?
The question of whether your business should have a hosted solution is one to be assessed according to your business structure and its needs. An SME with staff that all work from the same office won't benefit significantly from a hosted IT service, the cost of which would be significantly higher than owning and managing the equipment and software in-house. For a mid-size business with a heavy investment in existing IT infrastructure, the cost of moving to a hosted solution would likely outweigh any benefits of doing so.

However, for an SME with a mobile workforce or one with a number of small branch offices, a hosted solution offers significant benefits. Without a hosted solution, mobile workers would need high bandwidth VPN connections back to the company's servers to be able to run core applications on the road. With a hosted service, everything can be done using a web browser and without the need for a high bandwidth connection.

In addition to providing access to core business data to a mobile workforce, hosted solutions also move the typical IT department tasks of technical support, back-up, maintenance and user support to the hosting service. So, potentially, an SME with a handful of mobile users and no IT department could still service those users with 24/7 support supplied by the hosting service. It is these economies of scale that make hosted services attractive to many SMEs as they can purchase essential business services for a fraction of the price of providing them in-house.

Hosting options
There is very little that cannot be purchased as a hosted service and the market is expanding as suppliers move from selling boxes of product to offering applications as a managed service. Microsoft, for example, recently launched a hosted version of its Exchange Server for email management. While this won’t be of interest to a business that already runs its own Exchange Server – it doesn't offer the depth of features of that product – it is targeted towards a business which currently uses POP 3 or web-based email services like Hotmail. The attraction is that, in addition to basic email, these businesses will get access to a richer collection of features built around the basic email product. These include online calendar and scheduling features so that meetings can be scheduled and invitations and replies can be send and managed from the Exchange Server tool.