How SMBs Can Use Cloud To Act Big
SMBs often shy away from big tech changes more than their larger counterparts: after all, they can’t afford even a single Ford Edsel moment. The risks inherent in betting on unknown outcomes is higher. But cloud isn’t some dream of how computing could be. It’s not the future like jetpacks, it’s the future like central locking. And it carries far more benefits for the SMB than for larger enterprises. Why?Because large enterprises are benefitting from services they generate in-house,which smaller businesses often have to simply do without. With a good cloud provider you can contract out everything from security through business processes to data management and behave like a much bigger company, in a non-Edsel kind of way.
1: Hand Over Your Security and Compliance Concerns
CIOs of larger firms worry about regulatory compliance and data security, malware and leaks. For smaller businesses that’s even more of a worry because there’s less hardware and specialised staff to work on it. But there is someone who has loads of both: your cloud provider. Get your security and compliance backed by an SLA and it’s a problem you can tick off. Cloud computing gives SMBs a streamlined, efficient security and compliance concerns.
2: Better Collaboration Through Cloud
One of the big differences between a smaller business and a larger one is attention to working processes. As a result, larger businesses handle things like interdepartmental communications and keeping clients informed automatically while smaller concerns struggle to locate documents and juggle the phone, email and productivity. The more of that you can hand off to the Cloud the better, and managed cloud can take on the tasks that big companies handle in-house, letting you roll like a Fortune 500 company.
3: Data Control Becomes Easy
When you’re running to keep up with OS and hardware changes and shuffling documents and spreadsheets around multiple computers, you’re probably all too aware that a lot of that time and energy is wasted. If three or four people need to work on a project, as often as not the result is three or four mutually contradictory versions of it. Cloud makes this and other aspects of data control and management effortless for the business. You become the end consumer, soall you have to produce is what your business actually does. In the age of slick managed cloud, producing and servicing your own IT makes about as much sense as producing and servicing your own electricity grid. You (probably) don’t need a generator – and you probably don’t need a data center either.
