5 Reasons why SMEs are Investing in Secure Office Networking Right Now
As a technology leader at a small or medium-sized enterprise (SME), you and your team face some unique and hefty challenges. Chances are you’re trying to create a secure and productive environment for your remote and hybrid workforce. At the same time, you’re driving digital transformation to respond to changing client demands. You’re also continually striving to deliver a flawless customer experience, both internally and externally. Yet, to ensure profitability, you also must remain prudent and strategic about your technology spending. It’s not an easy feat, and we get it.
To overcome these challenges and meet your goals, your team must bring outdated infrastructure up to speed. Often, this means investing in a new, secure office network. In this post, we illuminate a few reasons why network updates are at the top of the priority list for today’s modern SME, and how the technology investment can help you keep costs down and productivity up.
1. Enhanced Data Security
We’ve shared this statistic in previous posts, but it’s worth repeating: In the UK, one SME is successfully hacked every 19 seconds, and 65,000 attempts occur every day! Cyberattacks continue to grow more frequent and sophisticated, and SMEs will continue to remain a top target in the year ahead. This troubling landscape puts your data—and your reputation—at risk. Security breaches can also halt your operations altogether, resulting in significant profit loss.
The solution is a modernised network, and here’s why. A modern network will help your team control who has access to what data. It will also help you prioritise which applications to focus on to best protect business-critical functions. A modern network will provide greater visibility into a basic, but critical question: Who is doing what, with what, and from where? As a result, you and your team will be able to drive stronger, more effective and agile policies to protect your SME across all threat vectors.
2. Better Productivity and Performance
In today’s world of remote and hybrid work, everyone in your company requires secure and reliable access to data and applications, from wherever they are working from. A modern network helps you deliver on this need. An improved network—with built-in SD-WAN— will safely connect your staff, boost your network performance, and help you control costs. One note of caution here: not all SD-WAN solutions are created equal. Seek a seamless solution that delivers improved user experience, instant ROI, and simplified operations, like Fortinet Secure SD-WAN.
A modern network solution will prevent bottlenecks and automatically prioritise network traffic based on predefined rules. And it will continuously monitor and self-learn to maximise network performance. Investing in the right SD-WAN network solution will also enhance regulatory compliance and deliver better cloud usage and speeds, all important factors for your productivity and performance.
3. Simplified Management
We mentioned the many challenges you face, like security, productivity, digital transformation, and customer experience. In today’s world, simplicity has never been more desirable; the challenge is developing a holistic, seamless infrastructure without sacrificing security and performance. A modern network will help you streamline your operations without hindering your security, performance, or functionality—all of which are key ingredients to help your SME grow. An improved network solution will centralise and consolidate management across your entire environment through a single, cloud-managed pane of glass.
4. Lower Costs
We also mentioned the tough spot you’re in—solving for myriad challenges while remaining prudent about your technology spending. As you know, keeping costs low will ensure your SME is competitive and profitable.
A new-and-improved network can help reduce operating costs while improving your team’s productivity and impact. For example, with a modern network, you can automate routine yet time-consuming tasks and ease the stress on your team of monitoring, maintaining, and upgrading a network. In fact, if you opt for a network-as-a-service solution, you can keep your costs transparent, coming out of your capital expenditures rather than your operational expenditures. More and more, organisations are preferring to pay for technology infrastructure as a small, recurring operating expense (OPEX), rather than a larger, less frequent capital expense (CAPEX).
5. More Flexibility
In today’s world of work, flexibility is just as important as simplicity. Think about it: As your SME continues to grow, your network needs to be able to evolve, and you need a network that can scale with you. A modern network will scale alongside you, whilst providing affordable, enterprise-level security and ensuring the highest levels of performance, stability, and security.
The Bottom Line
Let us bring it all home for you: In today's business landscape, SMEs need to modernise their operations in order to stay competitive, and it all starts with modern office networking. The right solution will deliver enhanced security, better performance, simplified management, cost savings, and the flexibility you need to grow.
At Optec, we can help you modernise your network and enhance your network security with our range of network security solutions. From secure Next-Generation Firewalls to a fully managed network-as-a-service solution, our experienced team of network engineers can help keep your organisation secured and growing.
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