Starting your business?

What do you need in the way of IT stuff?

Generally you want to have the absolute minimum. There are lots of costs involved in starting businesses, so keeping all areas to a minimum is usually a wise idea.

Often business computing can be done after hours from home. Don't waste money where you don't have to.

If you need to have a computer at work, there's no major problem in bringing in your home computer, maybe getting an ADSL link, some POP3 email addresses and USB Hard Drives for backups and leaving it at that.

The most important thing is Backups. Data protection is vital. If you do work from home, take one or more of your Backup hard drives to work every day. See the section on Backups if you haven't already.

Grow your IT as you grow
You can grow your IT as your company grows. The thing to keep in mind is to try to make sure that your systems are expandable, rather than replaceable.

Generally this is not too difficult. The main thing to keep in mind is Operating System - don't start out with Mac's if you will most likely end up using Windows or Linux or vice versa. Most other things don't matter too much, but a sudden change in operating systems can be expensive. Often though, these work quite well together, but it is generally better to be all Windows or all Linux or all Mac's.