So how does Cloud Computing benefit small businesses?
Posted by John Panico on Sun, Feb 28, 2010
In my last post, I defined Cloud Computing and gave it a "very cool" factor. Well the "cool" factor is nice, but to quote a popular commercial from the 80's, "Where's the beef?". In other words, what does Cloud Computing really mean for small businesses? At our company Virtual Resources we like to say leverage the "Cloud" to reclaim time and money. What small business owner wouldn't want more time or more money to invest in their business?
Let's start with the idea of keeping more of the money you make. Procuring the required hardware or software for a start-up or growing business is an expense that many entrepreneurs/owners would like to avoid or simply cannot afford. Imagine if you were freed from the burden of purchasing your IT resources? With Cloud Computing there is no capital equipment to buy. If I could pause for effect right here, I would. You subscribe instead of buy and in most cases it is for a monthly per user fee. Your capital expense has just turned into an operating expense. Better yet, if your business has access to capital, you can re-invest it into a more strategic initiative that will help your business grow!
A great example of this concept is the need to replace or upgrade an outdated phone system. It all depends on the number of users and handsets but for most small businesses this is a capital expense with at least 5 figures. More and more small businesses are already taking advantage of higher bandwidth internet connections, so looking at a hosted VoIP service would be a great fit. Now, how about the idea of creating more time to focus on what you do best? Unless you're in the IT business, maintaining and upgrading your hardware and software is not generating revenue for your business. Conversely, it's probably taken you away from your business when there are problems. If you've ever had a server crash and did not have access to your email or another critical application, then you know what I'm talking about. Most cloud providers are utilizing state of the art, highly available and redundant infrastructure to run their services with highly trained technical staff to maintain it. And most services come with Service Level Agreements with guaranteed uptime so you can work "on your business" and not "at your business".
What excites me most about the concept of Cloud Computing is that it is real and it is only going to keep improving with more available services. Gartner Group predicts "a fifth of enterprises will hold no IT assets by 2012 as Cloud Computing becomes commonplace". Remember the term "E-commerce"? I rarely hear that term used anymore. We just say, "I bought it online". The same thing will happen with Cloud Computing where we won't have to explain the term. Rather, we can simply smile and say "it's in the cloud".