Your business is growing and, like all small business organisations, the data you’re managing continues to increase at a substantial pace.

Business growth is always the goal, but managing the data you need to run your business can present a myriad of challenges. Depending on the industry or sector you work in, you will have differing needs and objectives when it comes to your data and infrastructure.

How and why small businesses need to manage data

When considering how to manage this, a data centre for small business should be top of your list. Why? There are a variety of reasons, but to support rapid growth, the five outlined below offer insight into why choosing a data centre for small business is right for you.

1. Regulatory requirements
A key element of successful business growth is ensuring you meet the compliance responsibilities associated with your business in a secure and streamlined manner.

Take, for example, the financial and healthcare sectors. Small businesses operating in these verticals will know that keeping data secure, sovereign and readily available is critical in assuring compliance with regulation such as PCI or HIPAA. A data centre will enable you to meet these obligations by allowing you to retain full control over all your data, as well as keeping it completely separate from any other data, eliminating the potential risks that shared infrastructure can pose.

You will also find that deploying a data centre for small business offers advantages for disaster recovery. It enables you to rest assured that your data and applications are housed in a facility that you control 100 percent. This means that if the worst happens, you have total control of your disaster recovery efforts rather than being reliant on a service provider.

2. Custom application development
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a great way to provision the apps your employees and customers need. But off-the-shelf SaaS may not offer the specific capabilities you need.

If you have an in-house development team, they will benefit from a dedicated data centre that allows them to spin up resources when they need them without swiping the credit card, and use specific toolsets that might not be available from your service provider.

Such a data centre will also be of benefit for applications that have critical legacy dependencies, such as Windows 7, or applications that if upgraded, could risk data loss or corruption, as well as possible mis-handling in terms of compliance obligations.

3. Big-data projects
These projects often start out in a public cloud, particularly during proof-of-concept stage, but as the volume of data grows and a project’s scope increases, a data centre provides the most cost-effective means by which to store and manage that data. Public cloud costs soon rack up when data volumes spiral, while migrating data from that cloud infrastructure (lock-in) can prove extremely tricky.

Read the extended article from Cisco here.

Our infrastructure team are always on hand to help. If you’re unsure on whether a data centre is the best fit for your business or not, we’ll happy help you through it. Give us a ring on 0114 242 9860, or contact us here.