Business Classifications for IT Management

SOHO, SMB, Enterprise—Which one describes your organization?

Other Categories

Education

When a vendor promotes products for Education, this can be one of two things:

• Inexpensive, simple devices for students to get their schoolwork done on a student's budget.
• Enterprise equipment, software, or services for the educational institution itself at a discount.

Government

A product or service "for government" can mean different things depending on the vendor. For cloud services or any kind of data storage or comunications systems, the "government" designation means it has achieved an accreditation for both the technology used and how it is managed, such as FedRAMP, or its precursors FISMA and FIPS. For other instances it means specialized hardware, such as body cameras for police departments. For services, it commonly involves special expertise transitioning from very old technologies that government is more likely to have around than private enterprise.

Healthcare

Medical equipment is some of the most advanced technologically, with specialized software not found anywhere else, and the highest level of reliability given the potential life-and-death consequences of failure. The industry also presents unique challenges for managing customers (patients), dealing with admissions, recordkeeping, and information sharing while complying with rules for patient privacy. As with education and government, these considerations do not replace the main classifications of SMB and enterprise for healthcare, but must be considered in parallel—the management and design of the IT system for an individual doctor in private practice with a boutique office will be quite different from the IT system for a 1,500-bed medical center.