As a small business, you can't afford to overdo technology
The desire is real! Everyone wants their small company to feel like it's got the technology of a big company. The good news is that it's more comfortable to accomplish today that it ever has been. The bad news is that many small businesses try to treat technology like the more prominent corporations from a decade ago and fail to jump out of their comfort zone. I've was advised more than once that we needed to run our email on an exchange server because that what big companies do.
If you want to know how we optimized our small to medium business for the last eight years, then look no further. It's quite simple.
We moved everything we could to a reputable cloud service.
We were able to accomplish this with highly sensitive information safeguarded by HIPAA and know that our data was more secure than we could keep it ourselves.
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People often asked me if this was secure. It is if you do it right. First, I would always ask what the alternative was. We could hire a 24/7 staff of IT security experts to safeguard all our servers and computers, or we could simply move the data to places such as Google's or Amazon's cloud where we could implement security measures that we didn't even have the time to dream about yet.
We used Google Drive and Dropbox to share common files and avoided local file servers where possible. We used encryption and moved quickly to new standards such as two-factor authentication.
We used Gmail (and sometimes Outlook) for our email service. We hosted our website in the cloud. We hosted our logistics management software in the cloud. Our central database and maintenance tracking system were also in the cloud. The office could burn down in a fire, we could run to Best Buy and purchase new laptops, and we could all get back to work at our houses within hours. We did it all without dedicated IT staff for many years.