For a modern business to succeed, it needs to be ready to face any challenges. But, just as importantly, it needs to be ready to accommodate growth. The technological term for increasing or decreasing your resources to accommodate either of these situations is called scaling, and it’s vital for your business’s success.
Scaling is a vital part of any business in the modern world and is vital to consider. Making sure your business can scale at a moment’s notice can be the difference between success and failure, so making sure that you have an effective scaling strategy is crucial to make sure your business prospers long term.
In this article, we’re going to go over everything you need to know about scaling. We’ll take a look at how you can better understand your business’s needs, as well as the key parts of a scalable business strategy, and how partnering with a managed service provider can help. With this, you’ll be able to make sure your business remains scalable in the long term.
Understanding Your Business Needs
The first step in knowing how to make your business more scalable is to understand your business’s needs. After all, knowing how to scale your business is only good if you know what to expect — and how your business needs to upgrade to be able to accommodate growth in the long run.
The first step is to assess your current IT infrastructure — ensuring that you have an idea of which parts are already scalable and which parts are harder to scale up. That way, you can have an idea of what aspects of your business you need to upgrade to increase scalability, looking into more scalable options (such as the cloud).
Then, you’ll need to take a look at your future growth requirements and everything you need to be able to grow and succeed in the future. By making a note of this, you can ensure that you address the most important aspects of your business’s scalability head-on first, to ensure that growth is supported in the long term by adjusting what’s required to accommodate it within your scaling strategy.
Key Components of a Scalable IT Strategy
Network Infrastructure
Network infrastructure is vital when considering scalability. After all, as your organisation grows, so does your network traffic — and failing to accommodate to meet these needs will cause disruption on a long-term basis.
When considering your network infrastructure’s scalability, look at performance, flexibility, and redundancy. This means making sure that your infrastructure is modular, meaning that it can be upgraded to meet performance requirements in a flexible manner, and also implementing failsafe and load balancing measures to accommodate large amounts of traffic and combat infrastructural stress.
Data management and security
When it comes to scalability, data management and security are a massive part of ensuring your data strategy works even when your organisation is attaining growth. Making sure that you have a scalable data-storage infrastructure (and strategy) is vital, as it’ll let you scale up and down depending on your storage needs in the long run.
Using robust data security measures that can scale up in users — or that can easily secure increasing amounts of data — like encryption and access controls will let you secure your data no matter how much you scale, meaning that your data is always secure.
Cloud solutions
The cloud is one of the most scalable solutions available today, letting you upgrade or downgrade your resource implementations with a few clicks.
Utilising the cloud to its fullest potential will let you scale with ease, meaning you can easily take advantage of scaling and ensure that you’re not wasting any money as your business continues to grow.
Software and applications
Making sure that you can scale applications and software — considering licensing, availability, and servers — is also vital.
This is why it’s best to choose applications and software with licenses that you can easily increase the number of, to make sure that everyone has access to the software they need no matter how much your business grows.
Benefits of Partnering with a Managed Service Provider (MSP)
Expertise and experience
Partnering with an MSP will allow you to take advantage of a wealth of experience and expertise. MSPs are filled with talented people, whose whole life is dedicated to helping lots of people with these kinds of technical needs — meaning you can benefit from that skillset.
Unlike hiring an in-house IT expert, an MSP will have lots of different technicians and staff with different experiences and viewpoints, meaning you can form an educated conclusion on what to do next.
Cost efficiency
MSPs are simply more affordable than hiring someone in-house. Rather than having to pay someone on salary, give them office space, and all of the bonuses and benefits that come with that, an MSP is simply an operational cost.
MSPs can offer better work than an in-house IT specialist, for a fraction of the cost. It’s a no-brainer.
Proactive support and maintenance
MSPs will be able to help you around the clock and provide you with proactive support and maintenance, whereas an in-house specialist will be working on salaried time and will often have to deal with lower-level IT issues before having the time to deal with larger problems.
On top of this, MSPs can easily apply patches overnight and as soon as possible, meaning that it won’t interfere with your business continuity.
Choosing the right MSP
Scalability is a massive part of helping your business remain successful and competitive. After all, the ability to grow is vital for ensuring that you can remain successful in the long run. But, making sure to choose the right MSP is also vital.
Why look anywhere else? We’re here to help and will ensure that all of your needs are met. Our skilled experts will be able to handle all of your scalability needs and ensure your business remains prosperous.
Get in touch with us now and see how we can help.