What if the tech your business relies on becomes obsolete in 2 years?

How to avoid investing in the technology, software, and processes that will become obsolete in 2 years? This is a hard question, but future-proofing your business is crucial, so let’s take a look.

The word “disruptive” has 2 meanings — innovative… and destructive. Every time a new technology emerges, it disrupts the market. Some businesses reorganize and benefit from new tech, while some are left crashed on the side of the road. How to ensure your business is amongst the former and not amidst the latter?

Trying to keep an eye on all the latest and the hottest trends to stay informed is not going to work, obviously. This would take too much time, and as the majority of content published daily is of little educational value, doing such a monitoring yourself would not be productive and conclusive. You would simply waste the time you’d better devote to growing your business.

Why not following the IT industry leaders then? Knowing of the latest tech developments firsthand can help determine the right moment to adopt these innovations, yes? Well… this might be so… if not for the fact that following even the big three of the IT technology giants — AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — would flood you with the stream of news and updates, most of which would be irrelevant to your business. In addition, there are tons of great open-source products you would miss this way.

One must also keep in mind, that not all new trends succeed, and following the latest tech does not mean making the best choice. One must allow some span of time to elapse before the hype wave goes down and the new tech proves its worth. Otherwise, you risk investing into something that will come out of operation in a year — exactly what you want to avoid.

To use the relevant tech — work with the competent partners

What is the best decision then? As always — ask the one who earns a living with it. Managed Service Providers are the companies that must remain ahead of the competition by constantly doing the R&D work, evaluating the new tech and adopting the best of it.

Thus said, if you order an audit of the existing processes, toolset and IT infrastructure for your business at least once a year — you will be informed if some mission-critical systems need updating or replacing with better alternatives.

Here is a free questionnaire to wrap it up:

• Do your products or services run in the cloud?
• Is your main product containerized?
• Is it split into microservices?
• Is it run with Kubernetes?
• Is it logged and monitored with ELK stack, Sumo Logic or FluentD?
• Are there any automated recovery scenarios in place?
• Is there any data analytics solution in use?

If you answered more than a half of these questions affirmatively — your business is mostly up-to-date with the tech. These are the main tasks any MSP has to deal with — and, based on the unbiased IT Svit customer reviews on Clutch — we do it well.

But if you answered most of these questions negatively — you need to think of updating the tech you use to future-proof your business. Should you like IT Svit to help you do this — let us know, we are always ready to help!