As a small business owner, you need a properly thought-through system that helps your business to bear any fluctuations in the market. Without any enterprise technology solutions, your business could face huge setbacks when the market goes down. There are many technology solutions your enterprise can benefit from without burning through your money.
Before you choose a business solution, there are several factors you should consider.
This is a combination of business decisions and your business objectives
Business Decisions
Budget and project timings:
To survive and grow, businesses should be profitable. Evaluate your business internally and plan accordingly to meet your targets. Your resource investment should balance your MVP (minimum viable product) and the right solution.
Skills and knowledge:
Evaluate whether you want to use past experience or a new experimental approach.
Resources:
How many resources do you have? Will you have sufficient capital in case you need new resources?
IT dependency:
Check the requirements for integration with your existing infrastructure.
Legalities:
Check the legal requirements for enterprise technology solutions and related products.
Patents and licensing:
Consider the re-selling restrictions on pre-existing software.
Maintenance and updates:
Take into account the costs, processes and needs to regularly update and run the software solution.
Targets and Objectives:
Longevity:
Consider whether your project is a one-time thing or a long term affair that requires a big team and different stages. On the one hand, you can use reusable code. On the other hand, you may require a whole new team and set-up for a project that needs documentation of its stages and the support of a big team.
Audience:
Don’t forget who you’re targeting, whether you’re talking to end consumers or other businesses. Typical projects that target end consumers need a broader cover of support for browsers and devices, as compared to enterprise technology solutions that can make do with more specific platform support.
Platforms:
Ask yourself whether your solution will be a native app or a browser app, whether it’s being designed for a mobile or desktop platform. It is suggested that you define future plans and a road map and what it is you expect from the solution in the long term.
Technical Factors:
This is the most important category of factors to consider.
Cross-platform or platform-dependent development:
Weigh out the pros and cons that each option has and understand their limitations. Trying the technology yourself first is a great way to understand the benefits and disadvantages of the solution.
Scalability:
Short-term wins are sometimes more important than trying to scale up prematurely. See this in the context of how your MVP prioritises features over long-term scalability issues.
Security:
Consider the data type and quantity that you will be working with and the level of security you will require.
Content needs:
Media content has very specific requirements that help in managing it, for example, transcoding and metadata. The problems of data ownership and the requirement for non-standard features might require starting from scratch. If you have no such problems, choose an existing solution. There are several economical video-hosting solutions, content delivery networks and solutions that are cloud-related, with geo-distributed setups for dealing with load times and speed.
Hosting:
There are several options for hosting, including centralised, specialised and distributed, used for different content types. You also need to consider the total cost you will incur. Your goal should be to find the right balance between the monthly cost of operations, initial setup costs, security, features and sustainability.
As you can see, there are several factors and categories to consider. It may sound tedious, but if you consider all of these during the planning process, your project has a higher chance of success.
