Four Business Technology Trends

New technological innovations and the growing ubiquity of the Internet are driving fundamental changes in the manner in which businesses operate these days. Increasingly, companies have moved from being largely locally sourced and locally supplied organizations to global entities with widely distributed suppliers, business partners and customers. Here are four of the top business trends that are being driven by technology changes.

Cloud Computing

The growing cost and complexity involved in maintaining an in-house IT operation is pushing many companies to cloud services. In a cloud environment, a company simply leases out applications, IT services, infrastructure and network components from third-party providers. Instead of owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure, many companies these days are opting to have it delivered to them in a utility-like fashion from cloud service providers.

Mobile Computing

The increasing sophistication of smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices has resulted in an explosion in their use by enterprises. A large number of mobile devices these days support feature-sets and capabilities that match the performance of regular PCs and notebooks of a few years ago. Increasingly, companies are looking for opportunities to link their legacy databases and applications to such mobile technologies. The goal is to harness the power of new mobile technologies to push out real-time business data and applications to mobile workers.

Outsourcing IT Help Desk Services

Few IT operations are more costly to maintain than IT help desk services. Typically, IT help desks have been cost centers that companies have needed to maintain even though they contribute little to a company’s revenue. Increasingly, many companies are looking to cut these costs by outsourcing helpdesk functions to specialized professional services firms. Such outsourcing companies typically provide a range of technical support services for hardware, software, operating system and network components. Most offer guaranteed service levels and deliver around the clock service at substantially lower cost than an in-house, on-premise offering. One major reason why a growing number of companies have been outsourcing helpdesk functions is because it also lets them focus on their core competencies.

Consumer Technologies in IT Environments

Until relatively recently, the only laptop computers, desktop systems and other client devices permitted within enterprise networks were company-issued devices. Most devices had standard hardware configurations, software images and security settings. The growing availability of sophisticated smart phones, tablets and other consumer technologies has begun changing all that rapidly. These days enterprise IT users in growing numbers are using their personal IT devices to access enterprise data and IT services. The trend has begun imposing new headaches for IT administrators from a management standpoint as well as from a security standpoint.