Is Your Small Business IT Scalable?

Posted on June 22, 2015

By Dave Turcotte, CEO

Say you’re starting a new business or growing the small business you already own. Do you stop and buy a new computer every time a new person comes on board? Do you purchase all of the apps that the new user needs? What happens if you only need that person on a temporary basis – would it be possible for that temporary hire to just use equipment he or she already owns? And which people on your staff are going to get stuck pulling double duty – working their own jobs as well as acting as the IT team, too?

These are all real IT concerns for small and medium businesses, whether in the startup stage or decades later down the road. Because when you’re a small shop, you don’t necessarily have the resources to devote to PC maintenance. That, however, doesn’t mean you don’t need to find a flexible IT solution –something like DaaS or Desktop as a Service.

Benefits of Virtual Desktops and DaaS for Business

There are a number of benefits to using a virtual desktop system like DaaS when you’re running small or medium business – including scalability. By scalability, I mean this: your small business can increase or reduce staffing as business conditions require without facing huge expenses and hassles associated with hardware or software.

In traditional IT, adding new users includes buying PC hardware, installing and licensing apps, and getting that new user on the network, among other things. It’s time-consuming and requires a significant capital investment and someone to do all of it.

If your small or medium-sized businesses is using a Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution for IT, you can easily get new users up and running, configured with the right apps and using hardware you already have or, if needed, by accessing everything through an inexpensive thin client (each runs you a couple hundred bucks). Users get the apps they need on a desktop environment that feels really familiar to them (it’s Windows and it runs just like it would if the user were accessing everything from his or her hard drive). You can custom-select apps each user needs and licensing is all taken care of.

Solving Computer Needs of Temporary Workers

If your company is driven by the calendar, you may need to ramp up at tax time, at the start of the year or for another cyclical event. And then a month or two later, you may need to scale back down. With traditional PCs, you’re providing PCs for the temps, licensing everything and then sitting on those licenses and hardware once the temps leave. If you have a DaaS solution, you can simply “turn off” user access to data and applications at the end of the season and then stash the hardware for the next ramp-up. Since no data is being stored on the user’s hardware, you might even considering allowing temps to use their own devices, BYOD style.

If your company outsources, virtual desktops can be equally useful. A call center can be quickly brought online, giving customer service reps access to the apps and information they require without any data physically residing at the remote facility center. When the project or contract is completed, the access just disappears. The same can be done for programmers, business partners, freelancers and anyone else who needs easily configurable access to company IT resources, regardless of location. And, incidentally, applications that live online can be accessed from virtual desktops as easily as from traditional installations.

And, as a business owner, you don’t have to hire an IT team or expert to do any of this. Just be sure you’re working with the right DaaS provider.

This is all a long way of saying that when desktops and applications live “in the cloud,” like they do with DaaS, your business benefits because your IT is scalable. So grow or shrink – it doesn’t matter – you can quickly ensure your IT solution and the costs to retain it remain manageable.

There is one other thing, too: DaaS can often be purchased as a monthly subscription so you’re only paying for the desktops and apps you’re using in any given month. Support is provided by the DaaS provider (ensure you find one that includes support in the subscription fee so you don’t have more surprise charges). This lets you keep your small business, new business, medium business or enterprise lean and concentrated on lines-of-business issues, not the care and feeding of end-user devices.