Factors To Consider Before Making Hardware Upgrade

Businesses looking to turn in outdated server equipment for a hardware upgrade have quite a task in front of them. Hardware isn’t just ordering a new printer and mousepads for the office. The technology world moves a mile a minute and staying up to date means planning for the future when buying your devices now. Innovations in online file storage and online networking have made cloud computing a strong contender for the standardized business practices in the future, and therefore worth considering. If you’re in the market for a hardware upgrade, here are a few things you should consider before purchasing new equipment.

What Are You Looking For?

If you want to upgrade, your current setup must be lacking in something. Outdated computers? Expensive networking solutions? Not enough file storage? The first step in upgrading may seem like an obvious one but identify what you want to gain in an upgrade. This is the first step in parsing out the myriad options and will help you to determine what is right for your company instead of what seems like a good idea, or what other people are using.

It’s easy to pay for space you think you need but never use. Some managed server solutions will scale along with the company so that only the amount of space used is being paid for, much like an electric bill in a house.

Budget

Creating a clear budget for what you need will further narrow your field. Sure a $300,000 on-site data center may be nice, but in most cases it’s unaffordable and excessive. When factoring in budget don’t forget that networking includes both up front costs and back-end fees. Companies who already have a dedicated server solution may be wanting to trim expenses and find solutions that offer what is necessary for a lower cost. This can mean finding more advanced, low energy servers to replace extant ones, or reconfiguring the service model and switching to a managed, or co-location server for data storage or web hosting. Remember, you have options! Choose wisely.

Reputation

When buying any new equipment it’s important to learn its history. Are current users pleased with the performance? Why did previous users switch away? You may be perfectly happy with the brand you have and simply want to stick with them, but researching the differences between old and new models will help you avoid a potential disaster if the “upgrade” turns out to be worse off than what came before it.

The more research you can conduct with respect to the repute of an equipment provider is, the less likely you will end up with shoddy hardware that fails to live up to its promise.

Future Proof

An upgrade now means not having to upgrade for a while. This is not possible with a simple replacement of hardware. Watch the market and see what the trends are, while balancing that with what your company needs. It is widely speculated that cloud computing is a wave of the future. Does your company need a network solution as comprehensive as the cloud? Will it in the future? For many who plan to do business in the next ten years, the cloud is almost an inevitability. This makes the consideration of cloud capable devices a necessity.

Smaller businesses that find they don’t need a centralized network accessible from anywhere can consider faster, more spacious machines to install in the office. This is often a more expensive enterprise due to energy costs, general maintenance costs and IT, but it will allow smaller businesses to have a bit more control over their network.

Security

Upgrading network hardware often brings the possibility of a security breach. This is more important to some companies more than others (i.e. law firms with sensitive documents stored, tech companies with unreleased code, record labels with masters of a high profile album, etc.), but even if your company is not storing what could be considered high-security data, you must be wary of keeping the data you do have stored and not mistakenly losing it in a migration to new hardware.

In this case, back all your data up to the hardware you will be transitioning to and if possible to a separate drive or server. Ideally, your new equipment will hold more than your current equipment so moving it over before initiating the full switch should be easy. Redundancy is the name of the game; the more backups of your data you can have while switching over, the better.