John the IT manager’s every day was the same. He went into work and made sure that leaders in the company can email and the company network is in reasonable shape. Made sure that outdated hardware is replaced when budget allowed, and in general that IT keeps up with updates. Of course, with the limited resources he had couldn’t get everything patched and AV was a constant headache as it slowed down some of the older workstations. It was really a no drama job.
And one day it’s happened , the worst nightmare of every company, a ransomware attack. IT system wasn’t the core business as John worked at a shoe factory. Who could have guessed that encrypting computers stops the shoe production? Nobody new the inventory anymore the factory floors were controlled by computers. Sales couldn’t access their contacts and keeping track of orders was impossible. The worst of all the payday was imminent and without computers it was impossible to do the payroll on time. Suddenly IT became the number one priority for the company. If this story seems farfetched read the Hydro story. Life is stranger than fiction.
Every company became an IT company at the heart. And every company need to continuously improve the way IT is operated. However, resources in IT are scarce especially outside of the technology and finance sector. The continuous loss of productivity may not be obvious, but the lapse in security will serve as a wake-up call. One might ask what can you do apart from asking for more resources? Be a startup.
Startups need to scale deprived of resources. They are typically extremely short staffed and have a very limited budget and they need to be super productive. How do they do that? Startups leverage the cloud and move with technology. You can outsource most of your IT chores to a cloud provider. Cloud provider can take care of patching systems, taking backups and detecting attackers for you. The economy of scale enables them to do this at a low cost and high quality. Startups today can serve thousands of customers with a single developer and no IT. Pinboard is a great example, it was running as a one-man operation and beating yahoo in the personal link management space for years.
Don’t be like John don’t spread yourself thin. Focus your team’s work on what is unique to you and leave the rest to cloud providers. If you want to dig deeper on the how sign up to our “Heads in the cloud” training.
Hassan Bazil