Five questions you should ask your office-in-a-box vendor

As an enterprise or business in today’s world, you should realise the need for digitalisation. If yours is a small or medium business enterprise, you have to bear more heat of competition than the bigger players offering the same products or services.

For a profitable business venture, data management is crucial and an effective office-in-a-box vendor can play a key role.

Businesses can no longer rely merely on the speeds, feeds and attractive discounts of the older data management solutions. Today, you will need IT vendors that come from the service-oriented industry and are accustomed to providing customer-centric data management and communication solutions.

The rapid pace of technological development across various industries has forced all enterprises to become digital and adopt effective data management solutions. It is rather difficult for small and medium scale businesses to tackle everything on their own, especially when it comes to managing data. However, IT vendors are there to help them with advanced data management strategies and solutions.

Here are five critical questions you should ask your office-in-a-box vendor:

1. What Can Their Product Deliver?
Before you think about utilising the services of an office-in-a-box vendor, make sure the vendor comes with the following abilities:

• The ability to make data management easy
• The ability to make the deployment easy
• The availability of an application set

The best aspect of the office-in-a-box vendor, however, should be its simplicity. The vendor for your data management and communication solutions should come with effective strategies that are simple to deploy, manage and operate. If the vendor cannot manage these things, then it may be a waste of money and time.

2. Does It Offer Easy Shipment and Installation?
Getting data management and communication equipment from a remote and inconvenient location will make everything difficult for you, as purchasing equipment from a remote place can invite a number of issues including logistics, weather, politics and several others. This can make the process time-consuming. Thus, you have to ensure that once the box reaches the site, it can start delivering the service without any time lag.

Choose a vendor who can build the box anywhere and ship it completely configured. Make sure that all applications including data backup facilities, disaster recovery system, data security and business continuity are tested and ready for use.

3. What about the WAN and Network Solutions?
If you want to operate your business from remote sites, you will need the service of WAN and networking. Here, you will need centralised software enabled WAN solution. This will help you to operate your business even from remote sites.

Now, you can design and configure the remote site for WAN deployment even when it is switched on. The WAN and networking service will help you to direct traffic to the suggested links and this will ensure maximum performance of the application.

4. Does It Come with Inbuilt Tools for Diagnosis and Troubleshooting?
Your office-in-a-box should perform as per your expectations. It should have the ability to provide you with a global view even from a central portal. When it comes to troubleshooting, it should have the ability to dig down and find the root cause of the problems and perform troubleshooting. The office-in-a-box equipment should effectively measure and diagnose the performance of all applications. Office-in-a-box vendors often apply cross-functional cooperation for immediate troubleshooting. This can allow you to concentrate more on strategic planning for business development.

5. Does It Offer Immediate Solutions?
The fast process of diagnosis and troubleshooting is a key feature you can expect from your office-ina-box vendor, as this will help you to improve your data management and communication systems. Your vendor should provide maximum network connections for better application performance. It should come with a full suite of equipment to transform a remote site into a fully configured operational site. All this should be achievable within minutes.

An ideal office-in-a-box vendor replies on standardised box deployments process, effective application performance monitoring system and preconfigured infrastructure. Their abilities help the small and medium business enterprises to enjoy high-performing data management facility.

Office-in-a-box vendors are the latest trend in the world of digitalised business organisations, where data management and advanced communication systems play important roles in business growth and expansion. If your vendor satisfies these five questions, you know you can effectively resolve one impediment to business growth.