The Power of Peer to Peer

Summing It All Up

This article is designed to highlight some of the possibilities, not to put forward the ideal that this is an all-encompassing solution applicable to every small business out there. It may in fact not be workable at all for some companies, depending on their security and scalability needs. But for others, it may be a great way to help maximize the resources you do have without incurring the administrative, licensing and equipment costs associated with a true Client / Server infrastructure.

The exciting thing for many of us is that technology that was once exclusive to large companies is now becoming available to the masses at a greatly reduced cost. The advent of DSL and personal routers has changed the landscape significantly for small businesses around the country and gives them more options than they have possibly ever had before. With a fraction of the capital outlay, you can have many of the same benefits, such as pseudo print and file serving and always on internet service with individual email accounts for each employee. No longer is it necessarily to spend tens of thousands of dollars up front for large server machines and a variety of server applications. Instead, you can grow your infrastructure judiciously until your needs exceed the reach of this interim solution, if they in fact do.

Many companies in recent years have seen their IT costs soar so quickly that it has shocked them to the core of their bottom line. It can be a humbling experience to realize that you may never get back a return that matches the initial capital outlay. It can also be a devastating experience to realize that because your infrastructure costs were so much higher than expected, you may no longer have the capital you needed to keep things going they way you had intended. The recent Dot-Com implosion is surely replete with such cases. This type of solution may not be right for everybody, but I'd much rather have the flexibility to explore options like these than be limited to only one or two choices that could bankrupt me within months if I don't hit the customer mother load fast enough. A long journey, after all, starts with but a single step, and to be frank, I'd rather be the tortoise whose business survives the hard times because of frugal planning than a hare who may be a high-profile risk-taker who throws wads of cash to buy the best of the best, but ends up sipping drinks at a combination Dot-Gone party and job fair wondering where it all went wrong...