During the last few disaster-prone years, small and medium-sized
businesses (SMBs) learned the hard way that they are as vulnerable
as large enterprises to hackers, hurricanes and the penalties of
not complying with federal regulations.
It's no surprise, then, that
The
Yankee Group's 2006 U.S. Small & Medium Business IT
Infrastructure Survey (Oct. 2006) found that SMBs' top concern for
2007 is security, closely followed by backup and restore, and
application and data availability.
"Optimization of technical assets" was another top priority,
according to the survey.
SMBs will deploy technology that helps employees "work smarter
not harder," according to Carmi Levy, a senior research analyst at
Info-Tech
Research Group Inc. in London, Ontario. "That's the mantra for
2007."
The good news is a growing number of vendors have adopted the
mantra "SMBs are hot."
What follows are predictions from five leading analysts on
what's hot and what's not, and the products and strategies SMB
technical decision makers should be looking at during the coming
year.
Security
Last month, The New York Times published an article,
"Online Swindlers Shift Focus to Smaller
Retailers." The main reason, according to industry sources
cited in the article, is that SMBs' online security systems tend
to be significantly weaker than those of large enterprises.
SMB decision makers are aware of this danger. "In the past year,
we've seen more SMB investment in antispyware and personal
firewalls," said James Browning, a vice president at Stamford,
Conn.-based research group Gartner Inc. "In 2007 we'll see more
intrusion prevention, and more interest in
ID and access management products that let
good guys in, as well as blocking out bad guys," he said.
Driving this trend will be increased Web development and Web
enablement of business processes, an SMB trend that began last
year, Browning said.
Disaster recovery
SMBs seriously need to build more resilience and backup into
their infrastructure during the coming year, analysts agree. "Most
are on the edge where a couple of bad events could shut down
business," said Gary Chen, an analyst at Boston-based Yankee Group.
"They need regular backup, either traditional scheduled file-based,
or continuous. And they need to have it off-site and tested, to
ensure they can bring up critical applications and data if
headquarters is wiped out."
In the past year, disaster recovery infrastructures have become
more affordable with the introduction of disk-to-disk backup and
server virtualization, Browning said.
Mobile and remote
"The SMB workforce has become much more distributed, mobile
global," Chen said.
"Midsized companies are getting the confidence to deploy mobile
solutions that address core business needs," Levy said. "Rather
than just give salespeople BlackBerrys, they will give them mobile
devices that integrate applications into the workflow, accelerating
business functions like data entry."
Costs are coming down. "Smartphone price points are going from
$700 down to $200, with greater capacity," Levy noted. Wireless
data networks are also increasingly robust, high-speed and
cost-efficient. "Cheap and easy bandwidth will be a huge driver of
business opportunity."
But as users become more mobile and distributed, IT staffs face
major challenges, Chen pointed out. One is securing the data
residing on laptops and at remote sites.
Application availability
SMBs also need to ensure that remote sites "have access to the
applications they need to be productive," while at the same time
ensuring that information created by those applications "doesn't
put the business at risk," noted Tony Prigmore, a senior analyst at
Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass. This definitely applies
to SMBs, he added: "Something like 80% of businesses in this
country have four or more offices"
High-speed IP and virtual private network links between
headquarters and branch offices will allow firms to back up
critical data and replicate critical applications on virtualized
servers at remote sites, Gartner's Browning noted.
SMBs should look at wide area network optimization as a way to
centrally back up and secure the data generated by remote offices:
either by enabling remote users to run their applications on data
center hosts, or by replicating data back to headquarters over
high-speed links, Prigmore said.
Bang for the buck
"2007 will see a very strong SMB drive to bring the total number
of servers through consolidation and virtualization," Levy said.
The technology is very much hitting its stride, with Microsoft,
Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices building virtualization into
their architectures and chipsets. "It's now relatively easy to
implement for an SMB without huge depth of knowledge of
virtualization," Levy said.
Deduplication, which automatically gets rid of duplicate records
in storage, "matured in '06, and should be broadly available in
2007," Prigmore said. "Before it was available, enterprises simply
overprovisioned storage, [and] overbudgeted capacity -- which is an
option few SMBs have."
Affordable storage networks allow SMBs to consolidate and
centrally manage storage resources, Prigmore said. Fibre Channel
switch prices are coming down. And iSCSI allows an SMB system
administrator to deploy and manage a storage network using familiar
IP and Ethernet technology, he added.
Software as a Service can help SMBs control
the costs of deploying and running applications, said Michael
Speyer, a senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in
Cambridge, Mass. "You're not doing a big upfront purchase, and
because the software is delivered over the Internet, you're not
tied to a corporate data center infrastructure." Leading vendors
like NetSuite Inc., Salesforce.com and Microsoft Live "have been
targeting SMBs from the get go," he added.
Business intelligence and the Web
Led by Microsoft, business intelligence vendors will target SMBs
with "right-sized, lower-priced products that analyze, report and
present business information to the right users," Speyer said.
Many of those "right users" will be on the Web, Chen said. "We
expect SMBs to get lot more percentage of revenues from e-commerce
in 2007 than last year."
Midrange companies in particular will increasingly use Web
development tools to deploy rich Web applications, which are also
moving within SMBs' reach, Levy noted. "This will allow SMBs to
compete more directly with large organizations that previously had
a lock on a sophisticated Web presence. It will help level the
playing field."
Indeed, that is one main reason SMBs need to start taking
advantage of the newly accessible products cited above, analysts
say: In an increasingly global and Web-based business environment,
they must compete against larger companies that are already using
them.
Elisabeth Horwitt is a freelance writer based in Waban,
Mass.