If you walk into a local five-person accounting firm, a boutique real estate agency, or a local consulting shop, you might be greeted by an office that uses consumer-grade electronics. You’ll see laptops purchased at big-box retail stores, home office routers from Amazon, and consumer-grade external hard drives sitting on desks. It might make sense that a small team doesn’t need the same tech as a Fortune 500 company, but in reality, a small office needs enterprise-grade hardware just as much—if not more so—than a 500-person corporation does.
Let’s look at the math that underscores why small businesses need more than just simple consumer-grade gear for their IT infrastructure.
The Risk of a Single Point of Failure
If a laptop crashes at a corporation with 1,000 employees, it’s a minor inconvenience. Their IT department will hand over a pre-configured replacement to get them back online in 20 minutes.
Small businesses don’t have that luxury. In a five-person office, there are no “spares.” If your laptop dies, that’s a significant portion of your entire workforce who can’t work the way they’re supposed to. If you’re the owner, then your whole business is offline. Deadlines will get missed, clients will get ignored, and you’ll spend a big part of your day trying to find something acceptable for the job in stock.
With enterprise-grade hardware, you’ll have more resilient components that are designed to run 24/7, plus you’ll have the expertise and IT assistance that a big business has, all to get you back in action as quickly as possible.
The One-Year Consumer Warranty Trap
Consumer electronics are generally built on a more disposable lifecycle, and their warranties reflect that.
When your typical retail laptop breaks under a standard 1-year warranty, the manufacturer usually requires you to box it up, mail it in for repair, and wait between 7 and 14 days to get it back. Enterprise-grade hardware works a bit differently; companies typically offer 3-to-5 year warranties with a guarantee that you’ll receive service on the next business day.
The difference here is staggering. Can you imagine going without your business laptop for two whole weeks while it gets fixed? No thanks.
The Centralized Management Baseline
Consumer technology is basically designed to be managed individually, which is an IT nightmare for your business.
Consumer laptops ship with “Home” editions of operating systems. These versions lack the core infrastructure required for automated patch management, centralized data encryption, and remote data wiping in the event the device is lost or stolen. To secure a consumer laptop, an IT provider needs to configure every single setting manually, which can become billable IT support if you’re not working with a managed service provider.
Instead of wasting time and resources on consumer-grade tech, you can save yourself from some serious headaches simply by working with COMPANYNAME.
When you invest in consumer gear for your business, you hold your breath whenever you experience technology troubles. We believe small businesses deserve better. Instead of purchasing cheap hardware, you can work with us to get enterprise-grade tools at a much more efficient cost. Learn more today by calling us at PHONENUMBER.