As a business enhancing your IT infrastructure can significantly improve your turnover and profitability but with so much choice it can be difficult knowing where to start – do you need a cloud server? What about SAM?  Is your hardware up to scratch? The optimum solution for your business really depends on your business goals and your current IT infrastructure.

We’ve taken a look at some of the hottest IT solutions available at the moment and how they can benefit your business.

Cloud Services

Cloud computing is a hot topic in the IT industry at the moment and not without reason. Basically cloud computing offers users IT resources such as software as a service over the internet. One of the great things about cloud is that users need no knowledge or control over the technology infrastructure in the cloud. All data and software is stored on servers this reduces in house costs by removing the need for expensive hardware. Cloud computing is also a green technology helping cut down your carbon emissions by reducing electricity output.

 

Software Asset Management (SAM)

SAM is a set of established processes and procedures for managing and optimising your businesses IT assets. Implementing SAM can help your business significantly reduce costs by helping you recognise what software you have, where it’s running and if your software is being utilised effectively. SAM is crucial to your business especially as software owners such as Microsoft begin to conduct audits of their customers to ensure licences are not being abused.

Virtualisation

Like Cloud Computing, Virtualisation is another hot topic in the IT industry at the moment. Virtualisation is the creation of a virtual version of a piece of hardware, software, operating system or server which can be operated on existing hardware. Virtualisation makes existing hardware more efficient and can increase resource utilisation rates by 80%. Increasing efficiency can help significantly reduce your IT costs, Virtualisation typically reduces hardware costs by 40% to 50% and power related costs by 30% – 70%.

Consumerisation of IT

This is not an IT solution itself but a trend in the industry to keep an eye on as it will lead to a review of your IT security. The Consumerisation of IT is where end users bring their own devices and connect to your corporate network. This throws up all kinds of security issues as IT departments will have less control on what content is accessed via machines connected to their network. A security assessment will be needed if this a strategy you want to adopt but this will be worth it in the long run due to the significant reduction in hardware costs.

Alex Smith is a regular blogger on technology and IT solutions and a big gadget fan.