Technology

Essential IT infrastructure for a small business setup

If you’re reading this, you’re in the process of taking your business from an idea you’ve talked to a few people about to something you can make a lot of money from.

What I will cover will give you all the essential knowledge to cover at least 5 employees. This setup will run and run, and when you finally hire an IT person, they’ll be able to effortlessly take over (and possibly question if it’s really needed).

Laptops and desktop computers

You must first decide between a desktop and a laptop. I highly recommend a laptop as this gives you the portability you might need and you don’t have to plug in anything other than the charger. Simple and direct.

Internet connection

The first thing you will need for your system to work is an Internet connection. It can be through a mobile, cable or ADSL. They’re all great, when used properly, but you need to pick one to start with.

For any office of ten people or less, you will be very comfortable with an ADSL connection from the cheapest and best rated provider in your area. You’ll want to ask for a static IP when you set it up and make sure you need it. Right now, it’s not important, but it could be later and will save you time later. Some services will charge a bit more for this, so I suggest you shop around.

In terms of speed, the speed advertised (for example, 20 Mb) is how fast you can get things from the Internet, and it’s mainly what we’re concerned about right now. The upload will usually be a much smaller number, perhaps 512 kbps, but usually the amount of traffic you’ll send back to the Internet is minimal.

You should look for bandwidth limits: Some service providers will throttle your speed or cut your connection completely when you have downloaded too many files from the Internet. This is less common now, but it’s important to ask.

Email, calendar and contacts

A lot has changed in the last six years, with the goal of moving from having your own mail server to using one managed by someone else (also known as ‘going to the cloud’).

Actually, there are only two players in this field: Google and Microsoft.

Many IT consultancies will push you toward a Microsoft Small Business Server, which, while it may look attractive, is very expensive both up front and in the long run when you move away from it. I cannot advise you enough to stay away from this product.

If you’re still stuck on the Microsoft idea, most IT consultancies will be happy to offer you a hosted Exchange server, but in its cheapest form, it will be 100% more expensive than the next offering, which provides everything Exchange hosted. does, and more.

The key innovator in this area has been Google: initially, they launched their incredibly popular Gmail product, which popularized the idea of ​​threaded conversations and lots of free space. This, along with unobtrusive advertising and a clean interface, made them probably the largest email provider today.

Office suite and note taking

office room

If you’ve gone with Google Apps, you already have your office suite set up: It doesn’t have all the features of iWork or Microsoft Office, but it has so many that for free, there’s not much point in going any further. initially. It supports word processing, spreadsheets, slide shows, drawings, and neat data collection tables (useful for emailing a questionnaire or posting one on a website).

But let’s say you need more: You’re trying to produce a very complex layout for a brochure, or you’ve got a devilish spreadsheet that Google Docs just can’t handle. Microsoft has written their office suite for Mac very carefully and it works very well. Apple has its competing platform, iWork, which for an additional fee interfaces nicely with iWork on your iPhone or iPad, if you have one. You can buy Microsoft Office for Mac (traditionally Microsoft gives odd years to Apple and even Windows) from anywhere else that sells software, or you can buy iWork from the App Store on your Mac. The advantage of the App Store approach is that it You’ll have it up and running in a few minutes. For Pages, Numbers and Keynote, the total is £42, but each app is purchased individually for £13.99. Office for Mac is around £150 or so, and you’ll need to use a DVD drive to install it.

Any files you create should be saved somewhere you have a backup, for example your Dropbox (read on…).

Take notes

Taking notes is helpful. Synchronized note-taking on Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android is even more useful. The chosen product in this category is Evernote, which gives you a generous account for free, and if you upload a photo (of a business card, for example) you can then find that image by searching for text on it. You can share notebooks with other people, which is great for creating a shared repository of information. These notebooks can also be shared with anyone on the internet, although this is entirely at your discretion.

Evernote will allow you to encrypt snippets of text, making it very useful for saving passwords. Select the text, right-click and choose encrypt.

Evernote is also a great place to store your documentation.

shared storage

So now that you have your internet connection, your computer, and can email people, you’ll probably find that you want a space to store your files.

My first recommendation for a startup will always be Dropbox. Dropbox is a small piece of software that runs on your computer and watches over a special folder, called Dropbox. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iPhone, Android, and Windows Mobile. Every time you add a file to that folder or make a change, that file or those changes are written back to Dropbox’s central servers.

A free account will give you 2 GB of space and will retain any changes you make to a file for the last 30 days, making it your personal time machine for everything stored there. If you delete a file, you can immediately restore it.

Also, you may have a shared folder with someone, which means that the folder on your computer that you shared with that person is a mirror image of the same folder on yours. You can see when they are working on a file and vice versa. As soon as they save the changes, these changes are replicated to your computer.

Finally, there is a special folder in your Dropbox, called Public. Anything you enter here can be shared with someone else by emailing them a link to the file. This is a great alternative for sending large file attachments via email or using FTP servers (great for artwork files, for example).

If you pay Dropbox, they’ll give you more than 2 GB, and instead of saving changes to your files from the last 30 days, they’ll save them forever, which can be useful if you need to display a chain of work.

For a more serious, server-like approach to file serving, I suggest buying a Synology Disk Station. Synology creates incredibly easy-to-use standalone servers that can hum quietly in the corner of a room without anyone noticing. They have support for something called RAID, which means that if a drive fails, you can simply swipe the broken one and replace it with a new one. They have built-in virus scanning for your peace of mind (although you have to enable it) and can double as a web server if you ever need it.

Remember that when you buy a Synology, you need to buy the hard drives separately: you don’t have to buy enough to fill your device at once, but you do need to buy at least one to be able to use it.

Security

You owe it to yourself and your customers to protect their data. Essentially, security can be divided into three categories: confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility. Encrypting your laptop, for example, helps maintain confidentiality, while backing it up helps maintain data integrity. Finally, accessibility is maintained by having a strong but sensible password to access your laptop. (To impress people, or maybe to bore them, you can tell them this is called the CIA triad.)

Next, encrypt your laptop

On OS X, this is business as usual, very easy: open System Preferences (it’s the icon with the gears), click Security & Privacy on the top row, and click FileVault. Enable FileVault, and now if someone steals your laptop, it will take hundreds of years for them to even have a slim chance of seeing what’s on it.

On Windows, as usual, it’s more complex: open the Start menu and type BitLocker to get started.

Happily, everything in Google Apps is only as secure as the password you choose: They’ve been audited against various international standards, and for extra security, they offer something called two-step verification.

Make sure to enable a passcode on your mobile phone and set it to activate after about 15 minutes. Make sure it’s not 1111 or something similar.

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