Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) may have similar business objectives and challenges to multi-billion-dollar enterprises, but that doesn’t mean they’re just a scaled-down version of those bigger businesses. There are noticeable differences from economic, cultural and management perspectives, with the added dimension of fewer dedicated resources across functions.
One similarity between these two groups is a focus on increasing technology investments to strengthen customer relationships and scale growing operations. Tech spending is on the rise among SMBs with 76% spending more on technology than the prior year, according to the 6th edition of the Salesforce Small & Medium Business Trends Report.[1] Like their larger counterparts, SMBs also recognize the importance of integrating AI and prioritizing data strategies to extract customer insights that accelerate product and service innovation.
What stands out as a significant difference is that SMBs must be inherently agile, to overcome resource limitations. Given their size and scale, they must do more with less: lower budgets, smaller teams, less expertise and fewer tools. This includes strategically balancing IT spend between running the business and transforming it.
Tech providers are a subset of the broader SMB landscape; they deliver digital content and services to enterprises. This segment includes SaaS providers, gaming companies, financial technology (fintech) companies, streaming companies and managed service providers (MSPs). Reliable, scalable infrastructure is integral to delivering and supporting their products and services, directly impacting revenues. Even a single hour of downtime, at an average cost of $300K per hour, is a significant expense for an SMB.[2]
What SMB tech providers need is an infrastructure solution to strengthen the delivery of their digital services and scale their access to regional and global markets and customers.
Centralized and single provider service delivery models introduce risks
Product and service delivery is not the only challenge SMB tech providers face. They are under pressure to improve and evolve their service delivery infrastructure to handle growing data volumes, provide optimal customer experiences, meet stringent SLAs, expand their geographic reach and tap into new markets.
Their service delivery platform must easily scale and connect to new locations to meet evolving customer needs and regulatory requirements, while avoiding costly vendor lock-ins with a single cloud or network provider or the inefficiencies that can occur when connecting with multiple providers. SMB tech providers also need the flexibility to run applications in the right environments, according to the type of coding framework or required performance, which may mean running the service on dedicated servers in a data center is the best choice. Meanwhile, they need to use services from multiple cloud providers or connect with customers running applications in the cloud.
The challenges are especially acute for tech providers delivering services across multiple countries or regions; they’re struggling with the costs and complexity of keeping infrastructure up and running 24×7 across time zones and geographies. Further, their infrastructure may be geographically constrained, with compute, data storage and power centralized in headquarters or regional locations far away from clouds, service providers, partners, customers and employees. Adding to the complexity, SMB tech providers may lack the budget to implement business-continuity or disaster-recovery solutions, making the reliability of their primary infrastructure even more crucial.
All these factors drive up costs, compromise security, performance and reliability, and strain scarce resources that SMB tech providers would rather use to drive innovation. They need a different approach.
Hybrid multicloud: an ideal combination
Because SMB tech providers are operating with constrained resources, they need a solution that is straightforward to deploy and manage across geographies with limited IT staff and budget. It must be affordable, highly reliable and secure, allowing them to easily scale as they grow while managing costs and freeing up staff and resources to focus on innovation and other strategic priorities.
Instead of attempting to rely on a single cloud provider or doing everything inhouse on dedicated hardware, SMB tech providers can take advantage of hybrid multicloud environments, which blend public cloud and private infrastructure to achieve an ideal mix of functionality, performance, geographic reach, cost-efficiency and flexibility.
Transitioning to a hybrid multicloud solution in a neutral colocation environment like Equinix opens opportunities for SMB tech providers to modernize their service delivery platforms, allowing them to:
- Accelerate revenue growth and future-proof their businesses.
- Simplify infrastructure management with predictable costs.
- Operate with flexible, interconnected infrastructure that easily scales.
- Securely and seamlessly connect distributed environments.
- Improve customer satisfaction with reliable uptime and application performance.
- Access 24/7 support of physical infrastructure by experienced technicians.
SMB tech providers no longer have to rely on legacy on-premises data centers, get locked into a single cloud provider, introduce security risks by using the public internet or centralized WANs to connect distributed infrastructure, or be hampered by geographic constraints that cause latency and performance issues.
Use cases solved with hybrid multicloud solutions
The use cases shared with us by SMB tech providers represent distinct requirements for solving their specific infrastructure needs and challenges. We work with many such companies to design and deploy hybrid multicloud solutions that help them achieve their business objectives. Let’s look at a couple of examples.
FirstDigital, a leading fiber-based carrier, needed to expand their voice services to meet demand from multinational customers without making CAPEX investments and enable expansion into new markets quickly and cost-effectively. Simultaneously, this customer aimed to become a certified Cisco Cloud Connected PSTN Provider (CCPP) globally.
They leveraged a service delivery platform powered by Equinix Fabric® Cloud Router in six key metros across Europe, Asia and Australia, facilitating seamless and reliable traffic routing between their Cisco and AWS deployments–with no physical hardware and last-mile connectivity required.
The new solution is estimated to cost 80% less than traditional physical infrastructure and improves performance by eliminating the need to backhaul traffic. Equinix’s interconnected global locations and virtual connections will enable quick and easy expansion in the future. Further, FirstDigital became a Cisco CCPP-certified partner and now offers Cisco voice services across 65+ customers. FirstDigital plans to use the same model to expand their Microsoft voice services internationally. Read the case study for more details.
Assured Data Protection, a global managed services provider specializing in data backup, disaster and cyber-recovery, was expanding into North America and needed to ensure high-performance service that met customer expectations. Their requirements included increased data mobility, vendor-neutral cloud access, and direct, secure connectivity to their platform for North American customers to ensure data protection and compliance.
They deployed their Rubrik Cloud solution on a service delivery platform in an Equinix IBX® colocation data center in the U.S. They used Equinix Fabric for private interconnection to multiple hyperscale cloud providers and secure, dynamic connections to global infrastructure and digital ecosystems. Doing so enabled:
- Successful expansion of service delivery to the U.S. market, increasing revenue.
- Savings of up to 70% on overall data management costs using OPEX rather than CAPEX investment.
- Up to 50% lower cloud data egress costs via private interconnection versus the public internet.
- Reduction of backup and recovery time from hours to minutes, resulting in higher customer satisfaction.
Read the case study to learn more.
Your path to a future-ready service delivery platform
Equinix enables SMB tech providers to unlock the power of hybrid multicloud to improve service delivery, expand markets and drive higher revenues. By leveraging the global portfolio of Equinix data centers, digital services and secure connectivity, SMB tech providers can flexibly combine the best aspects of multiple public and private environments to achieve an ideal combination of performance, capabilities and economy. For those with managed services customers already deployed at Equinix, SMB tech providers can use our secure connectivity to support those customers by seamlessly accessing their workloads.
Our high-performance data centers are in key business hubs across 74 metros on six continents to ensure global reach and proximity. Using Equinix Fabric, SMB tech providers can create scalable connections between owned infrastructure in different locations and access all the major cloud providers via our 220+ cloud on-ramps. They can also access the Equinix ecosystem, which includes 3,000 cloud and SaaS providers, 2,000 network service providers and 4,800 enterprises–all interconnected for seamless integration to optimize costs, performance and functionality.
To learn more about how you can transform your service delivery platform with Equinix, read the Optimize Service Delivery with Hybrid Multicloud solution brief.
[1] Small & Medium Business Trends Report, 6th Edition, Salesforce, September 2024.
[2] ITIC 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime Report Part 1, ITIC Reports & Surveys–Information Technology Intelligence Consulting, September 3, 2024.
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