Cloud for Small Medium Businesses – A Growing Trend

Over the years, technology has influenced almost every industry in maximizing productivity and improving their quality of service.

During the process, the technology-driven IT industry has significantly benefited from the technology revolution, resulting in the skyrocketing growth of many IT firms just because of effective technology deployment.

Beginning with large and complex machines that consumed time and high capital, we have come a long way to witness today’s world of intelligent technologies driven by continuous innovation.

This run for innovation and technology deployment has facilitated the growth path for firms irrespective of their size. The result is that even smaller firms can compete with big players because of innovation and technology deployment, revenue apart!

One major technology service that has been a boon for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) or Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) is the ‘Cloud.’

Let’s take a glance at how the Cloud can be beneficial to SMBs or SMEs in offering a competitive edge:

• Expand as You Go
  Days are gone when you must spend a lot in the initial stages. Now, you can pay for what you want, and Cloud has made it possible! With the cloud, you can deploy robust software step-by-step rather than going for it all at once. Doing this allows you to choose the one that suits your requirements at different stages of the product cycle depending on your priorities as and when needed. Besides, this also minimizes your unwanted spending, avoiding large capital expenditures. As the cloud involves on-demand services, you can keep updating your existing systems, infrastructure, applications, and services with new add-ons as and when required, thus strengthening your infrastructure capabilities and keeping them in line with the market competition.
• Faster Communication
  The fact that the cloud runs over the network supports the idea that engaging cloud services means faster access and quicker delivery. The cloud can facilitate information and communication, quicker community building, reaching out to the customer, and the strategic management and delivery of application services at a faster rate.
• Easy Resource Acquisition
  Cloud-based search has made it easier for firms to gain access to large volumes of employee data, thus easing the talent acquisition process. This is beneficial for small firms that are continuously seeking the right candidates. Besides, cloud-based communication and collaboration tools also facilitate a virtual mode of functioning.
• Safeguarding Assets
  Safeguarding assets is one major challenge for many firms in the current trend. Infrastructure issues or technical glitches often lead to data loss or theft. To address these concerns, the cloud offers efficient storage and backup options that can safeguard data in a safe and secure manner while ensuring productivity and saving costs.
• Stay Self-Sustained
  Huge and costly software, hardware, and server infrastructure are no longer a concern. Cloud computing has a solution! Cloud solutions provide you with an opportunity to have an individual and self-maintained privately owned server to store and manage data in-house. With the cloud, you can install, manage, and update email or file servers and run backups/storage easily without having to depend on some third-party service provider. It’s all just at your fingertip! However, the cloud vendor is responsible for service or application maintenance.
• From Anywhere and Anytime
  With the cloud functioning over a network, one can easily access their business and related applications and data from anywhere at any time with a mobile touch. Many traditional desktop-based application service providers have moved their services to the cloud, making access inexpensive for small businesses and enabling them to compete with the big players.
• All in One!
  You don’t have to worry about consolidating different application requirements separately. A single multi-cloud computing service can solve it quickly by allowing multiple tasks within a single application.

Growing Cloud Trend, Especially Among SMBs

There is a growing trend of cloud adoption among small businesses worldwide.

Reports indicate a global rise in cloud adoption, which is majorly driven by the usage of cloud-based services, such as cost-effectiveness, increased efficiency, mobility, the need for high connectivity, and structured and streamlined collaboration.

The trend is more likely to be among SMBs by 2020 owing to their basic requirements to save time and revenues in their path to gaining a competitive edge.

Here are some of the exciting facts that indicate a growing cloud adoption trend among small-scale businesses:

A large number of SMBs are currently using at least one cloud-based application as of 2018, and the number is likely to increase in 2018

• According to the reports, Platform-as-a-Service adoption is expected to rise 32 percent by 2020. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), among other cloud-based services, is likely to reach a USD 17 billion market by the end of 2018.
• A UK-based accountancy and investment management firm’s research found that around 76 percent of UK-based SMBs (out of 200 entrepreneurs and firms surveyed) are looking to adopt cloud services to gain business efficiency and a competitive edge.
• A Microsoft SMB study shows 78 percent of cloud adoption among small-scale businesses by 2020
• An IBM study shows that 75 percent of SMBs plan to implement cloud computing projects and improve their IT infrastructure.
• A Frost & Sullivan report found that SMBs’ investment in cloud collaboration tools has increased productivity by more than 400 percent.
• An Amdocs survey also found that 80% of SMBs were willing to keep their communication services on cloud-based solutions.
• There is an increasing trend of PaaS and IaaS among SMBs for consumer cloud services, file sharing, CRM, email, chat, and internal communication.
• While retaining an on-premise network, SMBs are more willing to integrate the cloud into their network infrastructure as they adopt new technologies.
• Hybrid configurations are gaining more traction among SMBs, especially in terms of maximizing existing investments and running effective workloads.
• Increasing inclination towards serverless computing for building and running applications to ease deployment
• Move towards Edge computing in a move to address cloud challenges in IoT, such as real-time response rates or data-transfer costs, and enhance cloud processing capabilities

On an EndNote

Overall, cloud solutions offer advantages to the SMBs in gaining a competitive edge. In a nutshell: cloud solutions for SMBs offer:

Cloud services have proven to be one of the most sought-after options for small businesses worldwide because of their ease of access and investment-friendly options.

Besides cloud adoption, there is also an increasing trend among SMBs towards support automation to lessen the burden on their support teams.

Analytics is another key aspect that is becoming another key area of focus for SMBs. Now, small firms don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on analytics platforms to gain the advantages of predictive analytics. Analytics tools are available for them just by subscription, and insights can be drawn easily in a plug-and-play mode.

Overall, SMBs have great opportunities ahead in adopting effective strategies to outperform the competition, and the cloud plays a vital role in this process.

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