Much within the IT industry has changed over the past few years. According to IDC research, in part thanks to the abundance of smart device and machine-to-machine communications, the digital universe is doubling every two years, and is set to grow to 44 ZB by 2020.
Even though the tech industry is mildly obsessed with technologies like big data and the cloud, we thought we would focus our whitepaper on the five must-watch technology solutions for small to mid-sized businesses, based on our insights and learnings from the solutions we’ve recommended to our clients.
1. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
DRaaS is replication, hosting and recovery performed by a third-party. With DRaaS, SMBs and larger businesses can take advantage of best-of-breed disaster recovery technology without the previously prohibitive capital costs related to data centre equipment and real estate. As such, it also provides SMBs all-important access to business continuity experts that might not exist in-house, as well as quicker, more turn-key deployment.
2. Tired Storage and Storage Area Networks
Tiered storage uses a hierarchy in which the most important, mission-critical information is stored on more expensive, high-quality media, while less-important, less-accessed data is stored on more affordable drives. It offers a compromise between the high cost of flash storage and low performance of mechanical storage devices, and since the price of SSDs (solid state drives) continues to fall and SANs (storage area networks) to support it have become more accessible to SMBs.
3. Business Process Automation (BPA)
A variety of business processes, from help desk, to facilities management, human resources and customer relationship management, suffer from delays as proper procedures break down or human error takes over.
While some organizations dealing with tight budgets have looked to outsource help desk and customer support to reduce costs, we’ve noticed that even more significant gains can be made by instead embracing business process automation (BPA) to reduce costs and ultimately realize a return on investment through streamlining and automating their repeatable processes.
4. Managed Wireless
Between 2014 and 2015 alone smartphone ownership in Canada alone grew from 55 to 68%1. In the same time period, we’ve observed an increased use of tablets and laptops, and its clear Canadians love being mobile.
For much of the workplace, especially Millennials, integrating mobility into the workplace is an expectation. But to be truly mobile, the workplace must also be wireless. An all-wireless workplace can bring cost-savings from reduced management and infrastructure, but also the intangible benefits of productivity from happier, more-connected employees who can seamlessly use business devices anywhere across the workplace and beyond.
5. Zero Day Threat Protection
Security is a never-ending battle between cyber-ne’er-do-wells and security vendors who react to their attacks. In fact, traditional security is inadequate against today’s threats. This period of vulnerability is the “zero day,” the time when a hole exists in the security unknown to the vendor until after it’s exploited by hackers. Typically security vendors then hurry to update their engines to contain the threats.
Just like every business in Canada, our clients face this relentless onslaught of attacks, which have are no longer just the purview of “hackers” wanting to annoy and disrupt business, but of full-fledged “cyber-criminals” seeking financial gain. The increase in ransomware seen in 2014 and 2015 demonstrates this.
So how do you beat a zero-day attack? With a clever new approach to security.
Lanworks, in collaboration with one of our vendors has come up with a unique security solution to prevent zero day vulnerabilities. We’ve noticed that our approach eliminates the days (or more) that it takes with traditional security platforms to respond to zero-day attacks.
For a more in depth look at how the five technologies outlined above can help your business, download our whitepaper.
1 Bret Longlois, Catalyst Canada, “With Growth Comes Changes: The Evolving Canadian Mobile Landscape”, March 2015.
