A study conducted by IBM and Oxford showed that a significant 70% of those organisations surveyed believe that IT infrastructure will help optimise business performance and endow them with a competitive advantage. They’re not wrong.
The truth is that your IT infrastructure matters much more than you think, and as a business owner it’s vital that you dedicate resources to building an environment that enables you to meet the ever-growing and ever-changing business and technology landscape.
The question is, as your business strives towards digitisation across every facet of your operations in an effort to improve productivity, serve customers, and connect with consumers, where do you start investing? Which infrastructure choice do you make?
The Importance of the Right Infrastructure
Generally speaking, traditional IT infrastructure consists of both hardware and software components, including facilities, data centers, servers, desktop computers, and application software solutions. It’s a far more physical environment that’s usually installed on-site for your company only, and requires more power and physical space.
These aging on-site data systems present multiple issues:
- The monolithic, siloed nature inhibits agility.
- This environment is less likely to meet the new demands for business agility.
- It’s cumbersome and time consuming as you rely on continual optimisations for performance, scalability, security, and compliance.
- Traditional infrastructure tends to be expensive and proprietary, and often involves vendor lock-in and punitive licensing terms.
The reality is that there’s very little point in continuing to invest in these aging on-premises data systems – not when modern infrastructure offers flexibility, as well as the ability to analyse data in real-time and store vast amounts of data at a low cost. Not to mention the fact that modern, cloud-based infrastructure isn’t restricted by inaccessible silos and opens up realms of communication opportunities.
While the notion of what’s ‘right’ can be subjective, we can reasonably say that from an IT/Telecoms usage perspective, there has been a rapid increase of data services. What with this and the fact that voice has become a subset of data in many instances it means that there is a strong case to be made for investing in data infrastructure to help support both data and voice services.
You only have to look around you to see evidence of this. In our personal lives, most of us have already eschewed actual calls in favour of WhatsApp calls and voice notes in our personal lives. In the corporate world, there’s a clear preference for Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Even in schools, there’s a growing expectancy for copies of classes to be made online. All this is nothing compared to the consumer expectancy and appetite for transacting online. Remember when it was optional to have an online presence? Now if your business can’t serve customers through digital platforms, it’s irrelevant and overlooked for those who will meet their needs online.
Why Invest in Voice and Data Infrastructure?
Yes, data and voice technology is the norm (for now), transforming our traditional communication systems through a wild and fantastical combination of voice, data, and video channels – connecting colleagues, consumers, and brands in an unprecedented manner.
A well-built data infrastructure has the potential to:
- Scale more easily: Traditional on-premise infrastructure famously makes it harder to scale your business, but optimised data infrastructure gives you the flexibility to grow your business.
- Easier delivery of messages: Say yes to call analytics and call features like IVR, and no to dropped customer calls or missed opportunities.
- Save: This solution eliminates buying costly hardware and additional dedicated lines as you grow.
- Increased reliability: Voice and data infrastructure provides a highly secure environment, which minimises downtime.
- Enhance staff mobility: Workplaces today are increasingly mobile, operating ‘on the go’ and sometimes working from multiple locations, which data and voice infrastructure can facilitate.
- Boost productivity: This infrastructure enables you to automate routine processes, connect departments, and streamline processes.
Connect Today
Now more than ever is the importance of technology a reality to businesses of all sizes – particularly when it comes to communicating with customers, potential clients, colleagues, suppliers, and the entire world.
Having the right infrastructure will help you deliver the business results needed to succeed. Huge Connect is uniquely positioned to strategically develop the infrastructure that your business needs in order to survive, compete, and more than succeed in the digital world where technology reigns.
Connect with us and let us help you today.
Sourced from: Huge Connect Blog. View the original article here.
