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Reinventing the future of work for SMBs

by Sandy Ono

Did you know that the SMB mobile workforce has now more than doubled?  Pre-pandemic, 24% of the SMB global workforce was mobile. Today, that number has jumped to 51% within small businesses and 47% in midmarket firms.1

Distributed. Remote. Mobile. These are the realities of your SMB workforce today.2 How do you thrive in this new normal? You reinvent the way you work—with solutions that not only enable you to work remotely but also to work differently in this new digital era. This means it’s time to reinvent in three ways: Workspace. Workflow. Workforce.

Here are some suggestions to help small and midsized businesses get going.

 

Reinvent your workspace

If you’re like many small and midsized businesses, the first step is setting up a virtual office. As you blur the lines between home and work, new challenges arise, ranging from how to deploy stable connectivity to how to keep your network and data secure.

More than ever, robust network connectivity has become essential for you and your employees to securely access files, applications and data—from anywhere and on any device. Without shared access to a central repository, files will likely be stored on personal devices, making it difficult to collaborate. What’s more, the increasing threat of cybercrime can make setting up a high-functioning, remote office a daunting task.

The good news is that HPE can help you migrate this new territory with HPE Small Business Solutions that scale with the help of affordable, flexible financing. We are here to help you:

Set-up virtual offices easily

HPE Office-in-a-Box Solutions are easy to buy, setup, and operate. These complete bundled solutions bring multiple functions, such as virtualization, storage, and backup, onto a single server. It’s a simple, secure, and affordable approach. In addition, management tools like HPE iLO remote management and HPE InfoSight can help prevent disruptions, improve agility, and minimize downtime.

The solutions bring together the performance, remote management, and security of HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers, along with reliable, cost-efficient Aruba Instant On wireless access points and wired switches, alongside resilient portfolio of HPE entry-level storage.

Manage virtual access smartly

HPE Small Business Solutions arrive ready to go virtual, including all the elements you need to succeed with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) or Remote Desktop Services (RDS). You can choose from Teradici or VMware Horizon® desktop virtualization for VDI solutions that deliver unbeatable reliability, high availability, business continuity, and fault tolerance to keep your workers at peak productivity.

Another great option is Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) for simple desktop applications—like Microsoft Office and Outlook. RDS enables users’ simultaneous access to the same applications using roughly the same amount of resources.

Worry less about cybersecurity

When it comes to addressing your cybersecurity concerns, these SMB solutions are backed by our industry-leading server, network and security expertise to develop the right remote worker approach down to the last mile.

 

Reinvent your workflow

Setting up a virtual office is just the first step. Next comes creating scalable ways for your employees to remain productive remotely. At the same time, you want to grow without disruption and balance cash flow without breaking the bank.

You can meet these goals with a hybrid cloud approach, but you are apt to still have some cost and security concerns. As you evaluate the scalability of public cloud services, you want to be aware of the potential gaps on data protection and exorbitant fees if you would like to bring data back from the cloud to on premises.

To get the best of both, you can reinvent your workflow with HPE solutions in a way that lets you:

Scale data protection

HPE Cloud Volumes offer an effortless, secure, and efficient solution with a suite of cloud data services that enable multi-cloud flexibility—and include encrypted backups that protect your business against ransomware. With a plug-and-play service like HPE Cloud Volumes Backup, you can start backing up to the cloud in minutes. Change where—not how—you do backup by integrating with your favorite backup software. You can eliminate costly egress fees and benefit from pay-as-you-go pricing.

Take advantage of financing

Extraordinary circumstances—like what we are working and living through now—threated business continuity and cause strain on budgets. HPE Financial Services is dedicated to alleviating some of this strain with programs designed to help businesses reduce cash outlays, generate cash from assets, and align payments to deployment schedules.

 

Reinvent your workforce

Today SMBs need a new game plan to engage and connect with customers. From customer service to customer acquisition, the only path forward is digital. We realize you may be struggling to wrap your head around how to execute.

Today’s environment demands remote capabilities that not only ensure business continuity functions but also deliver a robust end customer experience. In many instances, SMBs are tackling the challenge of standing up new digital services to keep pace with the rapidly changing environment we call the new normal.

The good news is that HPE can help you navigate this new way of working with easy to deploy solutions that are designed to:

Reduce complexity

HPE Small Business Solutions for Containers are reliable, ready-to-go configurations that include all the server, storage, networking, and software you need, as well as expert guidance for deploying the solution. The solutions leverage the open-source Docker containerization platform and are available on HPE ProLiant Gen10 services in a single-server, entry-level configuration and multi-server, high-availability configurations. You can use these solutions to drive productivity, reduce risks, and increase flexibility—all while getting more out of your hardware.

Prevent disruption with AI

HPE’s second generation of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI 2.0) brings together the best of HCI and converged architectures on a flexible platform—with truly independent scaling of compute and storage.

Combining the power of HPE Nimble Storage dHCI with HPE InfoSight and HPE ProLiant helps your business to reduce complexity by streamlining IT operations with AI-driven predictive analytics. It’s simple to deploy, manage, scale, and support.

With HCI 2.0, you can realize better total cost of ownership is guaranteed because, unlike traditional HCI, HCI 2.0 scales compute and storage independently. Disaggregated scaling means efficiency with no more costly overprovisioning.

There’s more good news. You can get time back because you are working with problem-solving that features predictive analytics and expert support services.

 

Ready, set, go: Reinvent the way your work (with a hybrid cloud approach)

Public cloud may seem like an easy answer your current IT challenges but realizing the full value of cloud requires solving difficult challenges. Initial costs may grow beyond plan, access to your data is more limited than on-premises, and a cloud breach may not be detected and reported until well after the damage has been done. Small and midsized businesses are reinventing the way they work by making a shift to move their IT from public cloud to private clouds. In fact, according to a recent report by Aberdeen, SMB deployments using private cloud on on-premises systems have nearly doubled and workloads on public cloud have gone down by 25%.3

What this ultimately means is that your business can get the most out of your IT infrastructure with a hybrid approach—one that will give you the best performance, management, and resiliency for your many varied workloads.

We are all in this together, and we are reinventing the future of work together with SMB solutions for industries like financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, professional services, and media and telecommunications.

With HPE Small Business Solutions, you can move quickly ahead and start reinventing your workplace, your workflow, and your workforce—with greater simplicity, security, and flexibility.

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1 Techaisle article: Remote work is escalating need for connected digital workplace platform within SMB and midmarket by Anurag Agrawal

2 Techaisle article: Remote work is escalating need for connected digital workplace platform within SMB and midmarket by Anurag Agrawal

3 Aberdeen knowledge brief: The Myth of the 100% Cloud World: Many Businesses Are Instead Boosting On-Premises Workloads

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