IT underpins pretty much all business these days. Whether you are running an online shop, selling services or even working as a solo freelancer, you are guaranteed to have IT requirements ranging from your website to your accounts.
But when you work for a large corporation, you quickly learn that IT has a lot to answer for…
IT Requires Physical Infrastructure
We all understand the idea of having a limit on the amount of storage on our phones but did you realise that this is the same for every computer and everything you can access on the internet?
Any company with a website may think of this space as simply ‘being in the cloud’ and usually, small businesses will pay for someone to ‘host’ their site. But the cloud is really a collection of large data servers and Google has somewhere in the region of 2.5 million servers to deal with the 40 million searches it gets per second.
Only when you work for a large company with a room dedicated to servers will you realise that nothing is ever really ‘in the cloud’ it’s just not in front of you.
Network Security is Paramount
Corporate espionage might sound silly but this, as well as scams like ransomware, actually does pose a threat to large companies. This is why having top level security on your network is paramount to doing business efficiently and safely.
While having a top security system is important, you should also be prepared for the worst. Having back-up servers and setting up a secondary domain controller is really important if you want to ensure that your business will keep going even if your infrastructure lets you down. To read more about this just click here.
‘Paper-free’ Requires a Lot of Organization
Going paper-free is a great way to up your green credentials and automate as many processes as possible but making the switch from paper to online sources is a little tricker than you might think. For one thing, creating a network that all employees have access to and can use fairly quickly.
Once you have this sort of network, you will also need to put protections in place that mean that your employees can work safely either at home or remotely – this is especially important for international companies where workers may go abroad or even work remotely all the time.
The best advantage of going paper-free is that you don’t have to empty file after file from endless cabinets. However, searching for something when you only have the vaguest inclination of what the document title is and when it was created is tough! This is why large corporations should put an organizational system in place to make sure that everyone can find what they need whenever they need it. This might include personal drives as well as a shared network.
IT is the next in a long line of things that can make businesses even faster and better but used incorrectly, it can be a real headache. And joining a large corporation will show you just how bad that headache can get without proper management!
- This post has been written for Morning Business Chat by an outside source – See disclosure policy
