Technology Trends for 2015: Help Your Small Business Flourish!

As the business evolves, it requires technology to support its evolution and growth. It’s easy for large company to adopt any new technology because big companies already have a significant budget at their disposal. But, when we talk about small businesses, there is always more at stake, hence wise planning and smart decisions are an absolute must. It is of great importance to think well about the type of technology to adopt and which technology trend to follow in order to achieve business goals.

With so many technologies available, it is hard to decide which one to opt for. Small businesses are always at risk in adopting technological advancements too late, which can have a significant long term impact on a company’s business plan.

In this article we’ll try to advise you about technology trends that must be considered in 2015 in order to keep up with the market and to give your small business company its piece of pie. It doesn’t mean that all of following technologies must be adopted immediately but it can’t harm to try and focus on important technology trends.

 

Business Technology

Mobility

As the number of mobile device users grow every day, fulfilling the requirements of mobile users has to be the one thing worth of paying attention to. It is, of course, a new set of challenges for IT organizations due to a variety of mobile devices and almost every client (present or possible) must have a positive experience.

 

3D printing

3D printing

Since 3D printers market is growing, it will soon reach the point where most 3D printers will be available at low prices. Using 3D printed models will reduce the costs by improving the design of the product, easier prototyping and easier manufacturing of the product.

Analytics

Analytics is very important in every business. It helps business grow in the right way. Wrong analytics can easily shut down the business and that is not what you want. Managing the way of filtering enormous amount of data collected from everywhere (mobile devices, social media and so on) and deliver it to the right person at the right moment is the goal you are looking to achieve. Analytics have to be deep, but invisible to the end user.

Moving to the cloud

Lots of computers, servers and other network equipment are part of the past for most of the companies nowadays. They all moved to the cloud server/client computing providing lowering the costs for computer equipment. Cloud server/client computing provides also on-site work. Limiting factor for this is bandwidth costs, so at this moment it is affordable to run coordination and management based on the cloud.

Backup and recovery

Every collected data that is well analyzed should be treated as business asset, not only as data because it has its value. For that reason it should be backed up safely and it has to have an option of fast recovery from anywhere. For that purpose it is a smart decision to backup your data in the cloud. It is cheaper than to have all the infrastructure needed for backing up and recovering data. As it’s said earlier, limiting factor is bandwidth costs so you have to decide which data are valuable and which aren’t.

Security awareness

Since you consider moving up in the cloud, the risk of reaching your business data is higher but most companies that offer cloud services have efficient security software and guaranties for security of data. This doesn’t set you free from implementing security policies and procedures inside your company. Every employee must be aware of risk of giving sensitive data (like passwords) to uncertified third party than can lead eventually to valuable data leaking. Education of employees is very important, too.

Beside the modern technology, some documents must be hard copied. Keeping valuable documents on the desk or in the desk drawer isn’t recommended. It is advised to keep them in the office safe. Variety of affordable office safes can be found nowadays on the market. Nowadays the number of small business companies grows every day since the most of small businesses can be lead from home offices in order to lower initial costs so this may just as well be the period for your business to flourish.

These are some technology trends that shouldn’t be ignored in 2015, and it’s up to you which one of them will you first adopt according to company’s business plan and budget.