But once a business grows larger than a single employee, you face a problem with that information. How do you maintain the information, yet still make it accessible to the different people in the company who need to work with it? Large companies have corporate IT departments who can do the heavy lifting of designing and maintaining complex computer networks, but most small businesses are hard pressed to get all their work done without adding the burden of caring for complicated computer systems.

Fortunately, computer networks have become much easier to install and use. You don’t need a dedicated server, and many companies find that a local network can be worth the investment if only to share resources such as an Internet connection or a fast printer. And now, it’s easier than ever to share data on a network as well.

You can easily share data by allowing other computers on the network to see a portion of your computer's hard drive, but the data is only accessible to others when your computer is running. A separate storage system than anyone can access at any time gets around that problem. Such products, known as Network Attached Storage — or NAS — make for an affordable and sophisticated small business solution. (They also are very handy at home, where they can make digital media such as MP3 audio files available to all computers on a home network.)

Getting Started with a NAS Device

As its name implies, a NAS device attaches directly to your network. Connect it using an Ethernet cable; you can plug it right into any switch or router. Then plug the power cable into an outlet. If it will be a mission-critical component, consider getting a standby power supply for it.