What's a business to do?
Clearly the first thing to do is to get more funding. Yes, business may return to normal with the advent of vaccines in the next few months, but you still need to get through those coming weeks. For that, you can look to cash from the SBA PPP loan program and COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loans and hope Congress pays attention to the US Chamber of Commerce; it wants these loan programs' deadline to be extended through the end of the year.
After that, you should look to see how technology can help save what money you have left in the coffers. I speak here as someone who's owned a successful Type C business for more than 30 years now: Vaughan-Nichols & Associates. I've also acted as a consultant for dozens of small and medium-sized businesses. These have included military and NASA "Beltway Bandits;" realtors; law firms; accountants; media companies, and more technology operations than you can shake a server at.
In short, I know a thing or two about how technology really works in business.
So with that in mind, let's start.
First things first, forget about going back to the office. Keep working from home. A recent business executive survey conducted by a top accounting firm, EisnerAmper, found 60% of business executives intend to make remote work permanent. Why? Because 70% of respondents said productivity either increased or stayed the same, while a mere 14% saw decreased production.
There are two points to doing this. First, there's the obvious. Most businesses have discovered that people work well without the office. Second, you can save real money by getting out of your commercial office lease.
You may have been spending a lot of dollars on idle office square footage. It's time to stop wasting that cash. Yes, you'll need office space in the future. But, odds are, you won't need as much as you've used in the past.
While we're thinking about space, let's also consider that room you're still giving to your own server rooms and in-house data centers. With cash tight, it's high-time to look at moving to the cloud.
In addition to money gleaned from space and utility savings, you can also save by using the cloud's elastic features; you only pay for the services you use. Generally speaking, you can also save some serious coin by switching from the private Capital Expense (CAPEX) model to the Operational Expense (OPEX) model.
If you're still not sure that you want to trust your programs and data to one of the major public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure, you might want to take a hard look at how reliable they really are. Yes, when a big-time cloud service goes down, it makes headlines, but chances are, their uptime is better than what you can do for yourself.
If you really do want (or need) more control over your services and still have to find savings at the same time, look to smaller cloud providers, such as Digital Ocean, Linode, or Rackspace. With these, you call the shots insead of some big South American river cloud company.
Finally, if you want to keep your hands even more firmly on the hardware and software, consider a colocation data center. These businesses will rent you everything from an entire data center to a small rack for your half-a-dozen servers. Companies such as Cyxtera, Evoque Data Center Solutions, Immedion, and Iron Mountain let you own and run your systems the way you want, while they worry about everything else. (If there's one service you'd just as soon not run — backups anyone? — most will happily offer you other services.
Of course, there's no guarantee you'll save money with either clouds or colocations. As with anything else, if you don't get the right setup or keep a close eye on your cloud expenses, you can lose bucks. But with due diligence, a dash smarts, and a dollop of flexibility, you rein in costs. More than ever, that's the name of the game.
Maybe in 2022, you can set up the office of your dreams in downtown San Francisco or Manhattan — commercial real estate prices are going down — or somewhere in Iowa. For now, let's focus on how technology can make or break your business and get you securely through the next few years. | | |
