Server With a Smile

There comes a time in the young life of every growing business when you have to ask, "Do we need our own server?" You may get to that point because you had a data disaster, or are tired of chasing down digital information that's scattered across multiple computers, or because those sorts of problems are exactly what you want to avoid. Some entrepreneurs may choose to entirely outsource the work a server does, but others will look to bring the hardware home to their office.

"Any small business that has more than two PCs has a lot of digital data," says Katy Hunter, group product manager for Microsoft's Windows Server division. "That's the point where we say it's time to start centralizing it, securing it, backing it up, and really treating it like the company asset that it is." Those are all top reasons for investing the time and money in an on-site server.