Is Your IT Infrastructure Ready for Long-Term Growth?

One of the biggest challenges for any business in the current climate is technology and IT infrastructure. Things are moving at such a pace that it can be incredibly difficult not just to keep up, but to plan for what you need to do in the first place. Add in the impact of AI and all the uncertainty that comes with it, and any business could be forgiven for not having a medium- or long-term growth plan based on having the right infrastructure in place.

Key questions you should be asking include:

• How much does technology and IT infrastructure matter to my business?
• How much of my revenue is dependent on the state of my infrastructure?
• What happens if the technology in my business stops working?
• Can my staff carry on working?
• Can my customers contact me?
• Can people still buy from me?
• What data do I store, and how much security does it require?
• What are the plans for my business, and how do I want to grow it?
• How are the people involved with my business (employees, customers, suppliers) going to interact with it?

This blog is designed to cover these questions and more.

Of course, every business is different, and therefore, so are its IT needs. With this in mind, this blog can’t promise to give you all the answers you’re looking for, but hopefully it will give you pause for thought, new questions to ask, and areas to consider improving.

The Role IT Plays

Whether you like technology or not, whether you think it’s important to your business or not, and whether you believe we’re over-reliant on it or not is largely irrelevant. Technology and IT infrastructure are now so closely integrated into everyday life that you need to accept the situation and plan accordingly.

IT plays a crucial role in how your business develops, how successful it is, and whether you achieve your goals. No one running -or who has sold- a successful business would accept mediocre financial management or poor recruitment. And yet many still view IT as “fine as long as it’s working” or “something we only look at when it breaks.”

If your IT fails, your business is in trouble, regardless of how visible the IT is within your business. Staff can’t work, customers can’t get in touch, invoices can’t be paid, suppliers can’t deliver, and in this world of instant decisions and limited patience, people will simply go elsewhere.

Whether you’re a tech-savvy business building mobile apps or a local shop selling goods online, IT is critical. It needs to be placed at the same level of importance as anything else within your business.

Depending on your business and what it does will define what core responsibilities and systems are kept in-house. To a lot of smaller and medium sized businesses, it doesn’t make sense to keep IT in-house. Having someone who can not only fix issues reactively but also proactively support growth is expensive. Consider outsourcing to a Managed Service Provider that can take care of your day-to-day issues and help align your IT with your business plans.

Growth Planning

How can you achieve anything if you don’t know where you’re heading? Or to put it another way: how do you measure success? Knowing the medium- and long-term goals of your business gives you a head start in understanding how critical your IT infrastructure will be in reaching them

That does not mean you need to start out with an all singing all dancing IT set-up. As mentioned in the introduction, things are moving so fast now that it would likely be outdated anyway. What you need from the outset are systems and processes that can scale as your business grows.

What you don’t want is to invest significant time and money in infrastructure that only gets you to a turnover of £5 million when your goal is £50 million. Your systems, hardware, and software need to evolve without requiring a complete restart.

Understanding your business goals from the outset should inform your IT strategy and influence every decision made along the way. Every quarter, hold a business review focused on IT and technology. Talk through the goals and plans of the business, if the IT infrastructure has been causing any pain points for the previous quarter,and what the quarter ahead is looking like. Longer-term plans can also be included to make sure improvements and changes are looked at well in advance of any implementation.

Scalability and Flexibility

Whatever your current setup, it needs to be flexible enough to scale alongside your business. Investment in your IT, whether that is in-house or outsourced, can be time-consuming and costly. You need confidence that the proposed solution is right.

If your communications system is outdated and requires your employees to be tethered to their desks, it’s not scalable. That means it will actively hinder your growth, frustrate employees and customers, and reduce efficiency. A hybrid system, where employees use mobile apps and stay connected anywhere, is far more flexible.

IT infrastructure budgets should be part of your scaling plans from day one. By aligning with your business goals, you can estimate costs and make smart decisions about recruitment, outsourcing, and future needs.

A flexible infrastructure also allows you to adapt to current trends and market changes. We regularly discuss working from home, and the impact that has had on businesses across the UK. Nobody could have seen the impact Covid-19 would have and even though it has been years since the pandemic ended the ramifications are still being felt very strongly to this day.

Regardless of the technology in use within your business it should always be implemented with an eye on the future and not just the here and now. How could that hardware or those systems be used in the future if you bring in more people or add in new products or services? Also, look at moving more services and hardware off-site, into data centres or into the cloud. This can help with costly hardware upgrade costs, and also with security issues, as the responsibility of protecting the data can be shared with the off-site host.

Data security and compliance

Security and compliance are often the most overlooked areas in IT. If the approach to IT in general is a “cross your fingers and hope” view, then data security and compliance is a cross your legs, arms, tongue, and eyes approach.

As part of the technological revolution and sheer amounts of data we consume daily, alongside most of our lives now being spent online, it is remarkable that so many businesses have no plan at all for protecting it.

Most people have heard of GDPR, it’s the ‘net zero’ of the compliance world, offering data protection rights to all EU citizens. No matter the size of your business, from a one-person start-up, through to a multi-national conglomerate, it’s a guarantee that you will be handling personal and private data on a wide range of people and organisations. How you store, secure, process, and eventually delete that data matters, and mishandling it can lead to serious consequences.

When planning for growth, put data security on the same level as the systems and hardware you will use every day.

The key to this is to put a robust plan in place. One that takes into consideration:

• Regular audits
• Employee training
• Password policies
• Data encryption
• Software updates
• Access controls
• Legal requirements

Like most things, it is easier to do at the start than 4 years in, or once something has been hacked and data has been stolen.

We will finish with some wise words that are great for any situation, not just for planning your IT infrastructure and growth – “Plan for what is difficult while it is easy. Do what is great while it is small.”