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The Right Tech Supports Organizations During Times of Rapid Growth

Scaling up quickly brings inevitable chaos. The key is to support employees and customers with needed IT solutions.

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Ryan has been a magazine and newspaper editor for 21 years, with the last 15 covering a variety of bases for CDW’s family of tech magazines. As Editor in Chief, he works on developing editorial strategy and is always on the lookout for new writing talent and sharing great stories with the IT world. In his spare time, Ryan enjoys spending time with his family, biking and obsessively following Iowa Hawkeye sports and Cubs baseball.

Many successful owners of small (and formerly small) businesses will find the following scenario familiar: The business starts by delighting its earliest customers. It gains a reputation for delivering high-quality products and great service. Business grows, but slowly.

Then a change happens. Like a fast break in a basketball game, the change is sudden and unexpected. Business booms.

It’s the great American success story, right? Not so fast. For many organizations — but especially for small businesses — a time of sudden growth can be one of great peril. Because as much as businesses need to grow to survive, they can also be undone by too much growth, too soon.

How the Right Technology Helps

When a business scales up quickly, a certain amount of chaos is inevitable. The key is to manage it so that customers continue to be thrilled and employees remain happy and productive. To this end, the right strategy is important, and having the technology to support it is indispensable.

The Houston Food Bank discovered this when Hurricane Harvey devastated the area in 2017. With staff size nearly doubling in a matter of months, the organization refreshed its infrastructure, adopted cloud solutions and acquired new endpoint devices. Along the way, it didn’t just keep up with change, it also ensured it was meeting client needs as it grew.

Your staff needs support as well during times of growth, especially remote staff and field workers. Morning Pointe Senior Living met this challenge by equipping its care professionals with specialized rugged devices that look like ordinary smartphones but also function as two-way radios and pagers. No more carrying around multiple gadgets for different purposes.

And, of course, as businesses grow, security concerns also grow. According to “The Cybersecurity Insight Report” by CDW, 30 percent of organizations now experience downtime as a result of a breach — up from 20 percent just two years ago. Deploying more than just standard firewalls and anti-virus software becomes more urgent as a business has more to protect.

For every business, growth is the goal. With the right tech solutions to securely drive and support growth, it needn’t also be a cause for concern.

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