Every business strives to achieve a general sense of growth. But many experts agree that growing too quickly can be just as harmful as not growing at all.
When your organisation grows too slowly, you don’t have the infrastructure needed to innovate, which means you’ll quickly find yourself surpassed by your more savvy competitors. On the other hand, growing too quickly could easily lead to a misunderstanding of what is going on financially, hiring the wrong people, allowing receivables to outpace sales growth, and many other potentially devastating issues.
These growing pains are joint in many industries. Still, the good news is that when leveraged correctly, technology can be a powerful asset in helping you achieve the right level of scalability for your business. This also creates a rock-solid foundation on which to build over the course of the next decade and beyond.
Technology can help scale your business in several ways that are worth exploring.
The Power of Automation
When you hear the term “automation” in a modern context, it brings to mind images of robots in factories that have been designed to replace human jobs. Over the last few years, in particular, Business Process Automation (BPA) has evolved in a way that enables you to not only offload important yet menial administrative tasks to your IT infrastructure but to do so in a way that allows everyone to work more efficiently so you can focus on serving your customers in the best possible way.
- According to one recent study, lost productivity costs businesses around the world $1 trillion annually.
- Another study estimates that about 40% of lost productivity is directly attributed to multitasking and task-switching — which seem much more convenient in practice than they are.
- This, coupled with the fact that about 97% of employees and executives think that a lack of team alignment ultimately affects the outcome of a task or project, gives you a better idea of just how big of a problem inefficiency truly is.
The right automation solution, on the other hand, can be a perfect opportunity to relieve all of these pressures and more. Business process automation alone is a way to accomplish several critical goals, such as:
- Free up your employees’ valuable time to focus on more critical tasks.
- A general reduction in errors across the board. Remember that many document-processing mistakes, for example, are user-generated errors. Automation can not only make sure the work gets done, but it can also ensure better accuracy.
- Increased operational stability. Documents are less likely to be misplaced, and computers will always follow the strict guidelines you set for them. Processes become not only accurate but also dependable and repeatable, leading to an increased quality of work.
When you look at automation from this perspective, it is not at all replacing your employees to relieve growing pains. Instead, it’s more about supporting and empowering them and allowing them to focus on tasks that help scale your business.
The Importance of Backup and Disaster Recovery
Modern technology is powerful but inherently fragile. One minute, you’re working on an important project for a client; the next, all that progress is gone due to an unforeseen hard drive failure. Or worse, someone clicks on something they shouldn’t have, and now your entire server has been encrypted and held for ransom by a hacker.
Both scenarios could be disastrous. Not only are ransomware attacks and similar types of cyber incidents on the rise, but one recent study revealed that 60% of small businesses would permanently close within just six months after such incidents. It’s challenging to scale your organisation when it’s going out of business.
This is why having a backup and disaster recovery plan that is thoughtfully constructed with your unique risks in mind and adequately tested regularly can help relieve your growing pains and help you scale more efficiently.
Even if you’re not worried about a cyber attack, consider the fact that:
- According to a study by Gartner, the average cost of IT-related downtime comes to an incredible $5,600 per minute.
- Depending on the size of your organisation, those costs could equate to anywhere between $140,000 and $300,000 per hour.
- According to a piece that ran in The Washington Post, these interruptions already take up an average of 238 minutes per day once your entire workforce is considered.
The right backup and disaster recovery plan can help you expect the unexpected, getting ahead of the issues that stand to stifle your growth so that you can scale your business without interruption.
The Impact of Cloud Technology
Finally, one of the most significant ways that technology can help scale your business is cloud computing — and more specifically, hybrid cloud computing.
Unlike the private cloud (which is totally in your control) and the public cloud (which is not), hybrid cloud computing offers you the best of both worlds. Any data that must remain under your control can do so while offloading everything deemed “non-essential” to a public cloud server. And you can just as quickly move from the public cloud to the private cloud and vice versa as needed.
These benefits are enormous, and they go far beyond simple cost-saving measures. They include:
- The hybrid cloud is naturally scalable, giving you the agility you need to adapt as your industry evolves all around you quickly.
- Cloud computing makes it easier to meet computing demands when you scale up or down your workforce.
- Hybrid cloud computing gives you access to the on-demand computing power you need to take advantage of software development tools and business analytics suites that can unlock valuable, actionable insight that would have otherwise gone undiscovered.
Any of these points would be a good argument for why you should turn to the power of modern technology to relieve your growing pains and help scale your business. Taken together, they make a compelling case as a critical investment you can’t afford to make.
Datcom: Helping Your Business Get Ready for the Future
At Datcom, our innovative Discovery Assessment can determine why your business is currently experiencing growing pains and what the right approach to technology can do to help them. More than anything, we believe in solving problems in the fastest, most efficient way possible and allowing you to enjoy all of the benefits that modern IT brings with the least amount of associated risk. We maintain that reliability and dependability are the way to go over “bleeding edge, unproven technology” — our Discovery Assessment will go a long way towards proving it.
If you’d like to find out more about how technology can help you scale your business, or if you have any additional questions about how you can get Discovery Assessment for your business, contact Datcom today.