Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs) are known to be the pillars of an economy. They are the growth drivers who contribute to the GDP considerably. The recent pandemic has pushed SMBs towards adoption of cloud technology in their businesses in order to survive and stay afloat. Business efficiency and continuity was a top priority for them during the pandemic, and cloud technology has certainly proved to be the one of the key enabler in maintaining seamless business continuity. It even helped SMBs to stand neck-to-neck with some of their multi-national brethren. It gave them an equal opportunity to compete in a, previously, one-sided market.
SMBs need to evaluate their existing technology stack and migrate it to the cloud for optimal performance. Continuous investment in maintaining an obsolete and monolithic architecture is expensive and futile. Rather, SMBs must shift from monolithic to a micro-services architecture that enables faster go-to market, dev-ops agility and business scalability. If you are an SMB, here are 5 reasons why you should opt for cloud-based solutions.
Mobility
If the recent pandemic has taught us anything, it is that remote data-access is crucial. Businesses have adopted the work-from-home mandate, and cloud can help them with remote access to all their data anywhere and anytime. This helps in sourcing a talent pool that is not limited to local regions, and can be expanded across geographies. Since, an office space and 9 to 5 culture isn’t the case anymore, SMBs can be flexible with their operations, providing them with remote data access and round-the-clock business.
Data Visibility
In small businesses, teams are often small, and data sharing is carried out in silos. The information flow is narrow and isolated which leads to reduced visibility from a macro-perspective. Data in disparate processes such as HR, Marketing, Sales, and Operations are stored off-line and access to such data becomes challenging. Cloud helps SMBs break these data silos and bring all the data at one place. Anyone within the organization with an internet connectivity can have access to this data-over-the-cloud. Data visibility and sharing becomes seamless, enabling in faster business-critical decisions and go-to-market.
Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Cloud technology has come a long way since its inception and offers a plethora of options based on customer’s financial appetite. It is considerably lower than what one might pay for an on-premise IT stack. As SMBs start small, they can take small steps towards modernizing their application landscape. To start with, SMBs can opt for a “lift-and-shift” strategy where the on-premise applications are migrated to the cloud. As the business scales, they can opt to move their entire application + infrastructure stack to the cloud. The entire upgrading, scaling, and patching is taken care by cloud OEM, with pay-as-you-go model which reduces the overall Total cost of ownership (TCO) considerably. In-case the business slows down, SMBs can also choose to stop their cloud subscription, helping them reduce their IT baggage. With the Cloud, the cost of maintenance and physical infrastructure components such as ACs and secure access to physical locations can all be saved as these are taken care of by the Cloud Service Provider.
Security
With recent rise in cyber-attacks, cloud providers have made it their top priority to provide their customers with a robust, resilient and secure ecosystem for their applications-on-cloud. It is challenging for SMBs to shift focus from their core business and create a secure framework around their on-premise applications. Investing in third-party end-point services, and security solutions might become expensive. Also, if you have a robust security periphery around your on-premise applications, regular patching, checking for latest updates, and rigorous tests can be challenging. Whereas, with applications-on-cloud, cloud OEMs are responsible for overall testing, patch management, latest upgrades, and ensure that your data is safe and secure at all times.
Scalability
Cloud-based solutions are built-to-scale. When you start at a smaller scale, you can operate with a pay-as-you-go model, with few applications on-the-cloud. As your business scales, cloud gives you the option to scale your IT stack with it. It also helps you scale-at-will. You can scale-up your database during your peak business period, and resume to normal when it ends, without investing in any additional infrastructure.
Conclusion
Cloud is the new normal and SMBs must consider moving their IT stack to cloud to leapfrog their competitors and build economies of scale. Clover Infotech helps SMBs by identifying their current technology landscape to create a tailor-made cloud implementation and/or migration strategy with optimum utilization of the budget in order to enhance their customer experience, and scale their business to achieve better ROI.
