Small Business Endpoint Virtualization provides a great way for organizations to increase productivity and reduce costs while minimizing risk and increasing agility.  There are an increasing number of endpoint options that users have from smartphones to tablets and various flavors of PCs.  This gives people the option to be connected when and how they want to.

Turbotek recently published the 2011 Information Technology Optimization guide.  In it, we laid out some of the key business drivers for small businesses for this year and the IT initiatives that are going to help organizations meet their goals.

Small and medium businesses have more options today as it relates to productivity software.  The traditional approach that involves installing Microsoft Office 2010 as an on-premise solution is one alternative.  A new, cloud alternative is Microsoft Office 365 (formerly Microsoft Business Online Productivity Suite).

Not only is going green good for the environment, but it can have a lot of great financial and other benefits for your small business.

There are many things to consider when virtualizing - storage requirements, number of users and disaster recovery to name a few.  One thing that should be at the top of the list is security. Small businesses are embracing server, storage and other forms of virtualization as a means of reducing costs, improving efficiency and becoming more agile.  The last post provides a framework for quantifying these benefits.  What about the security of virtualization? Does introducing this new technology make small business IT infrastructure more vulnerable?

We have reviewed virtualization and small business benefits at a high level in Small Business IT Virtualization - A Path To Savings, Storage Virtualization Benefits for Small Business IT and Best Practices in Technology for Small Business in Uncertain Times.  Let's go down a level of abstraction and talk dollars and sense, so to speak.

When I was in the information security business, my customers would say that projects were funded first for compliance, second for the needs of the business and third for what was the right thing to do from an IT perspective.  This led to a lot of over compliance, but it is an interesting lens when thinking about best practices in technology for small business, especially during these times.

We have been discussing ways to optimize infrastructure to be more proactive and drive business benefits through technology.  It would be an oversite if security did not enter the conversation.  At the same time, small business owners are being bombarded with hype about cloud computing and it may seem that this is the panacea for everything from e-mail to virus protection software and combatting malware.

In the end, it is customers that create IT solutions for small business. That said, outside providers need to offer the building blocks of products and services that together providers and customers knit together as solutions. This distinction is important because it is not generally the case that one can just purchase products and services, drop them in and expect that business outcomes will change dramatically without active involvement. Like anything, what one puts into something one gets out.  Let's take the example of something transformative like virtualization.  This is a word that many small business owners do not understand; but it is a solution that requires their involvement in order to overcome the problems - excess power consumption and cooling, lengthy disaster recovery, burdensome management - that it addresses. 

Owners considering computer services for small businesses have a wide variety from which to choose.  As mentioned in 6 Top Considerations for Small Business IT Implementation, proactivity is a more economical state.  Here are 6 steps to help you get there: