Solutions for all businesses - not just the enterprise

IT vendors provide scalable solutions for the enterprise market space - but the industry needs to focus on core businesses concerns for the smaller business. For many years the computer industry has been guilty of trying to treat small and medium organisations in the same way as they do large corporations with extensive IT departments.

Small and medium-size Microsoft Windows-based businesses require the same leading-edge technology as large enterprises in order to succeed and stay ahead of their competitors. All organisations need to optimise operational efficiency and manage the challenges of evolving business needs.

All organisations work with a mix of applications which means they require technology that enables them to compete at the highest level. IT infrastructures need to be able to provide protection, recovery and management solutions that are applicable to the smaller business, as well as being scalable so, as these organisations grow, the IT infrastructure is able to grow with them.

All businesses need to be able to select the most economical IT infrastructure for current needs and create the building blocks for a utility computing model that operates across virtually any storage device, server, operating system or business application while enhancing automation, performance, and availability.

Statistics reveal that many businesses do not regularly backup or successfully recover data in the event of a failure. The result: lost revenues, lost customers, lost productivity, and a diminished reputation that impacts the bottom line of any company, especially a small business competing against larger organisations.

To complicate matters, analysts estimate that almost 60% of business-critical data resides on employees' desktops or laptops. Organisations need solutions that protect data not only on local office servers, desktops and laptops, but in remote and branch offices as well.

Restoring data is just as important as backing it up. Rapid server and data recovery is critical in reducing lost productivity and revenue from unplanned downtime due to viruses, data corruption, hardware failure, human error, and other causes.

In many small to medium businesses, Microsoft Exchange is the critical application that businesses can't afford to have down - even for a few hours. With the continued growth of data at businesses of all sizes, organisations cannot afford uncontrolled, unmanaged storage.

To succeed, they need solutions that help them achieve three primary goals: managing the cost of storage, adhering to legal and regulatory requirements for archiving data, and managing the storage environment.