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In addition to the complications of pandemic recovery, your business may face other obstacles when it comes to upgrading your servers. Like all SMBs, you have to balance your technology needs with investments in other areas. For example, timing and budgets may not allow for purchasing new servers and expanding your team at the same time. And when it comes to budget, TechTarget recommends not only considering the cost of the server, but also the costs of software licenses, housing the server, and IT resources.1
Your IT department may be smaller than its larger corporate counterparts, potentially comprising just a few people, or, if you choose a third party to handle your needs, non-existent. When it comes to researching data center solutions, deploying servers, and providing support once the new tech is up and running, saving IT time could mean either freeing up in-house IT admins to take care of other needs or keeping costs low for third-party IT.
When it is time to upgrade, matching your needs to a server solution can be a complex consideration. You don’t want to overinvest in technologies with capabilities that don’t match your workloads. On the other hand, upfront costs aren’t everything—a suboptimal solution “might not be powerful or reliable enough to handle mission- critical workloads,” and could deliver a poor experience to both customers and employees.2 Such a solution may have a shorter lifecycle, which would mean investing in hardware and licensing costs, as well as IT resources, to upgrade again. Taking the time to assess your current and future needs—such as the types of workloads you run, the number of customers and employees you support, and the growth you anticipate—can help you select a hardware solution to suit your needs for years to come.
Any business must take a variety of concerns into account, but SMBs especially rise to meet a unique set of challenges: Timing, budgets, limited IT resources, and the search for suitable solutions may be just a fraction of the considerations your organization faces when it comes to upgrading.
1 Robert Sheldon, “How to purchase the best server hardware for small business,” accessed July 14, 2021, https:// searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/feature/How-to-purchase-the-best-server-hardware-for-small-business..
2 Robert Sheldon, “How to purchase the best server hardware for small business.”