Small businesses and the cloud: A match made in heaven?

When cloud computing first arrived on the scene, it may have been argued that it was primarily targeting those big businesses that invest millions in their IT infrastructure.

Well, times are changing – and this is an environment which is now open to everyone. One only has to look at the fact some venture capitalists, such as C5 Capital founded by cloud security expert Andre Pienaar, are now focusing their investments solely in cloud-related companies. The benefits of the cloud are extensive to say the least and through today’s article, we will focus on small businesses and just how they can reap the rewards from these systems.

The backup-factor

You might not have millions of customer profiles, but that doesn’t matter. As you have probably read in the news over the years, data protection is a big deal right now. It’s something that is landing a lot of big companies in hot water and if you don’t have adequate procedures in place, you can open yourself up to a whole host of legal and reputational repercussions.

In truth, this is a minefield, but one of the first areas you should be looking to keep on top of is backing up your data. On traditional systems, this can be laborious, and a real strain on resources. When it comes to the cloud, it’s all automated. Ultimately, if the very worst did happen and you lost records, it can be retrieved almost instantly from a recent backup.

The growth potential

In the start-up world that we now find ourselves in, companies are expanding quicker than ever before. Of course, when you put that initial investment into your business, resources are limited and you can’t be buying systems that are not going to be reaching capacity.

This is where the flexible nature of the cloud comes into the picture. The fact that cloud systems can be scaled up, or down for that matter, means that they can grow with your business. You don’t have to invest in infrastructure from the start – your systems can be upgraded as you grow.

The remote-factor

As we all know, we are also in the age of working remotely. New businesses are preaching this more than ever; they know that this is something that employees expect, while there are obvious cost savings to be had by not having permanent office space.

This remote-factor does lead to other savings which are linked to the cloud. It’s here where you can tap into one of the main features of the cloud, where data can be instantly shared. There’s no emailing of bulky files – everything is available on one system. Your employees can access your company resources whether they are sat next to you or sat on the couch at home.

Similarly, this eradicates the need for large disk space. You now don’t necessarily need this space to store files and applications – all of this is available on your remote, cloud system. Again, if we return to the issue of scaling, this storage can be increased or decreased depending on the requirements that your business has.