Information technology systems play a critical role in all growth strategies, from helping to achieve results to coping with the expanded scale of the organization. Many small businesses have ambitions to grow beyond their current size in terms of revenue and operational scale. That starts with increasing the number of prospects and effectiveness in winning and retaining clients along with attracting and retaining top employees. Target market needs to be aware of solutions or services, and you can increase this awareness through a variety of sales and marketing methods and campaigns. Advertising, promotions, partnerships and demand generation activities can all play a role in this model.

Underlying all the efforts, however, needs to be a robust and accessible store of information about the prospects you generate and their interest in your company. This information needs to be securely stored and yet accessible to those who need it. This may include not only people in your office, but also sales people who are traveling or executives accessing information from home outside regular business hours.

As your development efforts are successful and revenue grows, so does the need for more employees to cope with the demand, perhaps additional locations and certainly more systems to help those people manage the business processes. These systems need to be planned, implemented and supported by highly specialized talent, available as needed

Information Technology (IT) systems can help to create competitive advantage for your company, by improving customer service, accelerating time to market for new products or services and reducing operational costs by automation of tasks. Stable systems that are securely available to local and remote workers are the foundation of an effective business.

These IT systems can represent a significant cost however, and there are many choices in terms of the hardware, software, networks and services that you can use. You also have to balance the needs of your business today with those that you foresee in the future. Budget constraints will always affect the path chosen and the speed with which you can advance.

Making the right technology decisions takes a combination of experience and understanding. The experience that comes from having done it successfully before, and the understanding of the particular business opportunity you have.

Making the wrong IT decisions can mean having system breakdowns that impact business for hours or even days. It can mean ending up with poor communications, lack of visibility to critical business information or being vulnerable to security risks. A competitor who is exploiting a relevant technology better can get ahead of you. Small businesses need to have the best advice in terms of their IT strategy and yet most cannot afford to hire a full time Chief Information Officer (CIO) or even a technical expert.

Tera Networks can help to devise a plan for your business, to not only stabilize and secure your current environment, but also to work with you as you plan the future phases of your business and recommend the most appropriate IT strategy for your business. All without having to burden your business with the cost of full-time IT people.

Every small business has to focus on the cost elements of their operation and for ways to do more with less. The cost of employee wages and benefits is typically the largest expense line item in any firm’s budget. The use of Information Technology (IT) to automate processes and provide secure anywhere access to information increases productivity. IT improves employee and resource efficiency and has been a major driver in economic expansion over the last 30 years. That impact is increasingly seen in the small business area, where technology has allowed small businesses to compete effectively with larger companies, to enter new markets and to reduce their costs. Unfortunately, there are also many examples of where small businesses have invested in particular technology systems or solutions but have failed to see the expected returns. They have often suffered from having been poorly advised or from lack of understanding of the full requirements of a particular system or its operation.

Tera Networks is not the manufacturer of any IT software or hardware, and hence can be a trusted independent advisor to small businesses to help them make the right decisions in terms of using IT to increase the productivity of their business. We understand that technology must not only provide access to information, but make sense of it as well.

An example of one key area of increases in productivity in today’s market is through the secure access to company data and information for mobile workers, either via laptops, PDAs or other remote technologies. These solutions, when applied appropriately, can help workers who are out of the office to function with the same productivity as if they were in the office. They can access the same information, update in the same way and in general keep doing their jobs at the same speed as if they were at their desks. Examples include sales people out on client visits, realtors at client’s homes and technical support people at customers’ locations.

Tera Networks can help in designing and deploying solutions that increase productivity in small businesses.

Even small business can’t escape the increasing requirements to comply with local, state, federal and industry specific rules and regulations in terms of how they handle data.

Whether it’s HIPAA compliance in the healthcare industry or SEC requirements in financial services, there are many sectors of activity where client, patient, supplier or employee records, transactions and communications have to be stored, encrypted and archived securely and yet be accessible to authorized users.

Many of these processes are in fact also examples of good practice that could apply to businesses who are not actually obliged to comply with particular rules.

Building Information Technology (IT) support for these kinds of requirements takes a structured and experienced approach. There may be a need for particular procedures and documentation to be in place; for additional security precautions; for secure archiving and retrieval services.

Tera Networks can help you build an IT environment that will help your business satisfy these requirements in the most cost effective way possible.

Large corporations generally have extensive plans to protect their business from the impact of major interruptions to the operation of their businesses. Whether it’s through duplicate locations for their data processing, the availability of alternative work locations for their people or through extensive archiving of their corporate data, they have a strategy and processes in place to best prepare them to keep their business operating as effectively as possible.

Small businesses on the other hand tend to feel that they cannot afford to invest in the kind of insurance this represents. Their view is generally that they will save the money and take the risk, and that they couldn’t afford any of these kinds of things anyway.

The reality is however that there are many steps a small business can and should take to protect their business, without it being a major financial burden to them. Something as simple as having a disciplined procedure for taking back-up disks and tapes off-site for storage, can provide a first layer of protection against a major loss of company data. Or using an online back-up solution to securely store critical data.

Tera Networks can help review the requirements your business has in terms of being able to keep operating under adverse conditions, to help you understand the costs and find affordable steps and then deploy the selected solutions or define the required procedures.

It turns out that biggest challenge is not being able to afford disaster recovery solutions, but rather simply taking the time to evaluate the different options.