A small business can get by with very basic internet connectivity. A decent broadband line will suffice for email and web browsing, and possibly even the odd video call. The connectivity requirements of growing businesses, however, change in ways that may not be immediately obvious until something starts to break.

Growth transforms the connectivity requirements of a business in ways that go beyond just increasing the number of users that share a connection. It changes the nature of how the connection is used, the cost of outages and the infrastructure that needs to support, often, more complex operations.

The User Count Inflection Point

There’s a user count inflection point between around 15 to 30 employees at which point the shared broadband connection of a small business starts to become overloaded. The exact number depends on what the users are doing, of course. But the pattern tends to be similar.

It’s not just total bandwidth that starts to become a problem. It’s concurrent usage. With five users, there’s enough variation in what they do and when they do it during the day. With 25 users, there’s a constant demand on the connection, with multiple users usually trying to perform a bandwidth-heavy operation at the same time.

Video conferencing is usually the heaviest user of bandwidth. A small business with a small number of employees might have one video call happening at any given moment. A business with around 30 employees could easily have three or four concurrent video calls happening at once, in addition to employees streaming training videos, uploading presentations, and using cloud-based tools.

The Cloud Changes The Game

Shifting operations to the cloud seems to simplify connectivity requirements. In some ways, it does. But it also makes businesses completely dependent on internet connectivity in a way they weren’t before.

When a business hosts its operations on a local server, a brief outage is not ideal but it’s survivable. When business operations depend on the cloud, however, an outage is crippling. No one can work, no one can access the files they need, and no one can serve customers.

The cloud changes the requirement of connectivity infrastructure from “usually has to work” to “absolutely must work all the time.” Connectivity infrastructure solutions designed to offer internet for large businesses build redundancy and guarantees into the connectivity they provide that standard business broadband connectivity does not offer.

Multiple Locations Create Connectivity Challenges

Multiple locations also introduce a new layer of complexity to connectivity infrastructure. A single office, with a single business broadband connection, is straightforward. But growing businesses often expand into multiple locations, and many times even only partially transition to a new connectivity infrastructure.

File sharing between multiple locations increases bandwidth demands. Video calls between multiple locations require stable connections on both ends. An IT infrastructure hosted at one location needs to be accessible by employees at multiple locations. Cloud backups can easily saturate the cloud connections of multiple locations.

Some businesses attempt to solve this problem by getting separate cloud connections for each location. This works until someone realizes that employees at different locations are having drastically different experiences depending on which office has the best connection.

Uptime Requirements Change

A small business with a handful of employees can afford several hours of downtime without disaster striking. Downtime in such an environment is inconvenient but work can continue in other ways.

A business with 50 or 100 employees, however, cannot absorb downtime like this. The amount of work that’s lost if that many employees are unable to work for even a short amount of time starts to get expensive.

Standard business solutions can also take several days to resolve problems. There’s no promise of uptime and, when something goes wrong with standard solutions, there’s no guarantee that a resolution will happen according to the business’s schedule.

This kind of solution stops being viable at the point where the cost of downtime becomes greater than the cost of changing to a connectivity solution that includes uptime guarantees.

Security Needs Evolve

Small businesses might need cybersecurity defenses, but they’re usually not very lucrative targets for attackers. They might have a handful of employees working for a handful of clients, and they might only have a limited amount of data to protect.

But as businesses grow, the potential impact of an attack changes. More employees mean more attack surfaces for cybercriminals. More customers create more customer data that the business needs to protect. And more revenue also increases the chance that the business will be attacked.

The basic security measures that come with standard internet connectivity packages are adequate for basic infrastructures. But businesses that have outgrown their basic infrastructure have changing security requirements. They need security measures that actively monitor for attacks and respond in a timely manner, rather than offering just basic protection and assuming that attacks can be dealt with after the fact.

This is not only about preventing attacks. It’s about being able to detect when an attack is happening and responding in time to prevent it from causing significant damage.

Performance Levels Need To Be Consistent

Small businesses can adapt their behavior around an inconsistent internet connection. If connectivity seems to be slow or unreliable one day, they can find something else to do, or find a way to work around it.

Growing businesses cannot easily adapt in this way. When service representatives are handling inbound calls from customers who need assistance, inconsistent performance directly impacts their ability to provide good service. When sales representatives are performing product demos over video conferencing calls, inconsistent performance causes them to lose deals.

The tolerance for “it’s usually fine” drops to zero as a business expands. The performance of connectivity infrastructure needs to be good during business hours rather than whenever the level of congestion on the system is low.

Prior Planning Prevents Painful Upgrades

The worst time for an upgrade to connectivity infrastructure is when the existing connection is failing on a daily basis and causing business problems. Upgrades take time. New connections to the service provider need to be set up and existing systems have to be adjusted to accommodate the upgrades.

Businesses that wait until their internet connection is clearly inadequate for their growth face other threats too. They have to make decisions while feeling pressure and stress created by poorly-performing systems. They may end up making rushed decisions. And they may end up over-committing to solutions that exceed their actual needs.

It’s easier to catch a business on its growth curve early than to wait for it to reach its peak. A business that is gaining staff members, moving more systems to the cloud and expanding into multiple locations is relatively easy to spot. Adapting to changing connectivity requirements in advance of problems arising can prevent potential problems from becoming a barrier to a growing business’s growth.

Jane