Startups Stack Exchange Archive

IT Infrastructure for small startup

posted by: Display Name on 2016-07-13
tagged: software, hardware
score: 4

New startup happening over the next month or so. It’s an Engineering company I am interested in people opinions on the best IT infrastructure for me. Its been a while so i am open to ideas.

5 people, Quite heavy on data, Video etc. need to be able to show customer video remotely etc. we need good access to our data remotely. Security is a priority too.
Scaleability,

Is Microsoft server essentials the best solution? Citrix Xenapp? or VPN? Software firewall or hardware? Wireless network or hardwired?

What about using gmail for business?

Answer 9701

posted by: Marcus D on 2016-07-13
score: 2

IT Infrastructure is quite a broad subject - document management, email, data storage, communications software, security, integration, calendar, code control, permission control, etc ... Some things are packaged together like Office 365 or Google Apps, others you will have to go to market place and choose.

From a data storage point of view, I would go for one of the cloud platforms - probably either Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure - because as a general principle hosted platforms are the way of the future and the diversity of services they offer is astounding.

In general for your IT services, things you need to consider are the following: -

Geolocation of data. Does it matter where in the world your data resides? With Azure, you can specify where in the world your data resides, I think that AWS you can't.
Data access by the US Government. As long as it doesnt matter to you, law with regard to the Patriot Act. This case is still ongoing.
Security of data. How secure is the environment you are using?
Integration. How integrated do you need the environments to be with your other services?
Lock in. Are you able to transfer to other suppliers easily?
Uptime. 99.9% is the often quoted figure, which sounds great, but in a year that means 8.75 hours downtime. You need to know what this means to your business.

Often companies choose services in a piecemeal fashion, but actually if a number of the infrastructure/systems are chosen together there can be benefits of scale and integration.

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