Technology is changing the way we do business. 2010 has been a year, where one saw convergence of home and business, due to the devices that people brought into their workplace and the way networking gripped the world of business too. Indian small and medium business (SMBs) are connected and business opportunities are coming their way through this convergence.

Small is big now, with the Indian SMBs moving ahead, hiring new employees, opening new sites, gradually increasing spending on IT to streamline and add to their overall business. 2011 will be no different. We will continue to see some technologies dominate as well as enterprise level technologies receiving more attention from the mid and small businesses.

A peek into the technologies and practices that will steer the SMBs technology decisions:

Social Media
The way we communicate will continue to change in 2011 as small businesses increasingly leverage social media to improve customer communication and employee productivity.  However, small businesses will also need to understand how to protect and manage these non-standard applications, since business information that is communicated in these outlets will still need to be secure.  Social media archiving will grow in importance as organizations unleash the power of social business, while maintain archiving as a form of control to reduce information risk.

The Right to Choose: Appliances, Software and Cloud
While software continues to drive innovation, 2011 will bring new delivery models in response to the need of small businesses to ease IT operations, especially in the area of storage.  Cloud computing, hosted services and appliances are examples of increasingly attractive delivery models that provide small businesses with flexibility and ease of deployment for their backup and storage needs.  In 2011, we expect small businesses to increasingly adopt cloud services to optimize their storage for a greater return on investment.  
So in the coming year, how will a small business determine its best option?  For those without a dedicated IT staff, IT service providers can guide small businesses through the decision-making process by assessing what their storage needs are, and which delivery model will be best to address the business’ needs.

Prepare for Significant Cyber Attacks
With cyber attacks becoming more significant, SMBs are turning their attention towards prevention as they are learning just one attack that compromises critical information can impact profitability and place their business quickly in the red.

Small businesses need to prepare for such cyber attacks by implementing complete protection on their devices and educating their employees on best practices to prevent these attacks. Cybercriminals continue to play a cat-and-mouse game with security providers, which is why security providers are always working to stay one step ahead of them.

The Last Mile of Virtualization
Virtualization has been one of the biggest shifts over the last year and will continue to influence IT in 2011.   Companies everywhere are achieving the benefits of virtualization by reducing the number of servers in their environments.  While virtualization decreases server costs, organizations are realizing virtualization is simultaneously increasing management costs, and without a plan to protect these environments, they may not realize the full ROI.  

End-to-end security and storage products
The traditional approaches like antivirus are not enough to protect against the new age polymorphic threats and the malware variants. There will be a fundamental shift in approach of organisations to adopt the complete information protection solutions that eliminate risks to information, technology and processes at more points, more completely and efficiently.

The above technologies are some of the key ones that will dominate the SMB mind space as they look at ways of increasing efficiencies, while protecting their most important asset their information.

* Mr. Vineet Sood is the Head of Channels and Alliances, Symantec India.
* The views expressed by the author in this feature are entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of SME Times.