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5 Considerations for Small and Mid-Size Businesses When Deciding to Go or Not to Go Cloud
Small and medium size businesses (SMBs) have started to adopt Cloud-based solutions for meeting their day-to-day unique needs: the reason being lower costs, simplified data management and anytime, anywhere access. Nevertheless, implementing a Cloud solution can be tricky compared to planning the same. It requires meticulous planning, strategy and right partner to go Cloud successfully.
According to a research study and report from industry leader Forbes, by 2020, Cloud computing has increased significantly what it was in 2015 to today. The rate of growth as of today is 18% from what it was in 2016.
Here are the 5 considerations for SMBs deciding to go Cloud or not to!
Lack of expertise/resources
Strategizing and implementing Cloud in the right way is critical for business success. Lack of resources or partnering with startups having a little or no expertise to Cloud implementation or strategy could hurt the bottom-line of small businesses in addition to exorbitant costs.
Today, there are plethora of Cloud-based service providers available in the market. Launch on to the right one with relevant expertise and skills to make the Cloud journey successful.
Scalability of computing resources and business growth
Cloud computing offers excellent opportunity for SMBs to scale the resources for rapid business growth. Scalability plays a critical challenge every SMB planning to move the data to Cloud. Upscaling and downscaling your IT requirements when and as needed is imperative for assured business growth.
The option of increasing and decreasing computing required resources powers SMBs with a huge advantage over a fixed plan, leading to substantial growth. Only a reliable and dedicated Cloud service provider can formulate a defined strategy that ensures scalability.
Reliability and Data Security
Companies, especially SMBs, are afraid of the reliability and security aspect of going to the Cloud. There is absolutely no reason to. It would take a large amount of IT Staff to implement the level of lock down of physical resources that the Cloud security provides. Not only just that, the Cloud provides easy security implementation like encryption of data in transit and at rest, rule based flow of data in a secure fashion ingress and egress which takes a lot infrastructure and man power to put in place. The reliability of popular Cloud providers like AWS and Azure is probably better than any private data centers.
Cloud offers a lot of benefits to keep your business agile and secure. But, it is all about how you make it. Cloud computing is only beneficial when utilized properly. Setting up dynamic user and device policies for governing the user experience based on the type of device & user, where he/she is coming from, device used, connection speed, the security permission levels, etc. is critical and performing these without expert guidance could hurt your business badly.
Migration of Existing Applications
A common reason why most small businesses move their existing app solutions to the Cloud is to drive greater productivity at reduced costs.
According to Gartner, SaaS Cloud services is having a strong growth and is next to the amazingly growing IaaS services. Cloud app services (SaaS) has grown 20.3% in 2016 as most SMBs have started to prefer Public Cloud from last year and this could fuel the growth of SaaS market in the future.
The reason why most SMBs are attracted to the software as a service (SaaS) delivery model is for its compelling benefits. Nevertheless, it’s hard to migrate the existing applications to SaaS and finding creative ways to incrementally moving the app solutions to SaaS model is recommended for avoiding major disruptions. While moving to SaaS model is an amazing option for many small business owners, executing the process without expert care and forethought could be detrimental.
Finding the right implementation partner for Cloud
For small businesses, utilizing the Cloud platform is no longer an exciting way to reduce costs but to transform the way a business functions. Unless the business head decides to partner with a dedicated Cloud services with years of experience to advanced Cloud technology, tools and impressive clientele, they are likely to face plethora of challenges like:
- choosing the right one from SaaS, IaaS, PaaS,
- lack of expertise,
- little or no control,
- security and compliance,
- integration with existing infrastructure,
- performance and bandwidth cost, and
- reliability and availability.
So, from the above discussion it is evident that taking your small/mid-size business to the Cloud can be highly beneficial provided if you have the right partner with years of expertise and successful Cloud implementations for companies across different industry verticals.
