Why Small Businesses Should Move to the Cloud Immediately
The cloud has changed the way enterprises are run. Businesses now use the opportunity to move across service offerings, and deeper into newer paradigms in the subscription economy. Dare we say, cloud business solutions are here to stay?
While larger enterprises have the luxury and/or the need to create and maintain their own clouds, it is also equally relevant for SMEs to prioritise a transition to the cloud. All cloud providers (public, private as well as hybrid) boast of limitless scaleability, adaptability and superfast failure management. Regardless of the choice of cloud setup, here are three reasons why small businesses and SMEs should consider adopting cloud business solutions — immediately.
Lower Total Costs of Ownership (TCO)
Traditional hardware has 2 main problems — a) it is capital extensive, and b) it can not scale without adding more hardware. Virtualisation and containerisation (the cornerstones of modern day cloud), on the other hand, allow you to plan your capacity utilisation more efficiently, and maintain an overall lower TCO.
This capacity-utilisation curve from 2013 shown above shows how AWS S3 stacks up against hardware-defined storage. By being able to scale out, you’ll always be on top of your customer demands and get a better return on investment. Resources are neither under-provisioned nor over-provisioned, using only the optimal amount.
Also adding to the lower TCO is an OpEx model that most cloud providers operate on. This allows you to slash costs and minimise risks. As a small business, a subscription model is great to control capital costs as you only pay for consumption. OpEx can now be aligned with the growth of your company, making them predictable rather than sporadic.
Reliability and Flexibility
With cloud service provider offering managed services at high uptime guarantees (99%+), you no longer need to worry about infrastructure. As a small business, you need to focus all energy on building a stellar product. A managed cloud service takes care of all maintenance, upgrades and updates and allows you to focus on core development.
Moving to the cloud also opens up opportunities to hire broker services to act as intermediaries across cloud vendors. Broker services can help build customised clouds, bundling services from multiple vendors into one. For a small business, this helps break down vendor-locked ties and consume quality infrastructure.
There’s No Looking Back
Cloud computing has transformed the software industry, and continues to do so blazingly fast (18% CAGR for public cloud and 24% CAGR for enterprise cloud). There have been more changes in software and applications as opposed to hardware. Especially if you offer SaaS/PaaS, you should consider cloud migration as the highest priority to maintain strategic and competitive advantage. Any advancements in technology (VR, AI, IoT etc.) will only justify further, the need to be on the cloud.
Choose IndiQus
Indiqus is all about helping businesses stay ahead of the curve.
We offer you the power of cloud with all the above benefits plus a range of managed services like cloud migration, brokerage, private & hybrid cloud setup, training etc. We work with businesses to deliver scalable, cost-effective and business-first cloud solutions. Our offerings for smaller cloud service providers help them manage and monetise their cloud offerings via an intelligent cloud services marketplace.
Get in touch to start saving on your technology costs by migrating to the cloud.
Originally published at indiqus.com on May 20, 2017.
