If you are starting a business in this economy, and anyone comments that you have your head in the clouds, it is actually a very good thing.
Because far from it is traditional implications that you are out of touch with reality, the cloud is now where the cutting edge of business is done. Cloud solutions make perfect sense for today’s flexible, dynamic, always on business model in fact – and here is why….
What Is Working In The Cloud?
Instead of having software installed individually onto each machine, and storage on the computer hard drive or via removable media, cloud computing makes these functions available to you over the internet.
From backing up customer records, to accessing that graphics package, doing your business accounting and even functions like online faxing, you no longer need much more than a tablet or a laptop with a Wi-Fi connection to run your company.
In this system, you pay only for what you use, and this lean economics is ideal for a fledgling business. Cloud computing is removing more and more of the traditional barriers to access start-ups encounter, and in fact can even give them the edge over unwieldy blue-chip rivals, as today’s market prizes agility and responsiveness highly.
Low Cost, High Impact
If there is one thing all start-ups tend to have in common, it is a lack of cash flow, making investing in elaborate IT systems very difficult.
Cloud computing typically provides a much lower cost of entry than expensive software licenses or costly hardware.
This is because cloud applications are designed to be scalable – so the smaller your operation, the less you pay. Indeed, many have trial or enterprise versions with reduced functionality available for free, so can do certain tasks or even just trial them for a period before making a capital investment.
That frees up resources to concentrate on building your team – you don’t have to choose between people and process any more, as both are equally important to the success of your operations.
Scale Up (And Down) Easily
Sometimes, things can take off quite suddenly, and small businesses without a large and diverse client base are far more subject to dramatic fluctuations in fortune. This means that scalability is made more valuable, and cloud computing offers this in abundance.
Take the example of your company website – one of your most important communication tools. You may start out with a low number of hits a day, but through careful SEO and great content building, that daily hit rate starts to climb.
All of a sudden, some of your content goes viral and your website is inundated with visitors. You need to take advantage of that moment, and yet your servers are overloaded, the website crashes, and you have lost a crucial opportunity.
Because fixed servers aren’t scalable, by the time you get up and running you have lost customers and gained a reputation for unreliability. The damage is done at that point. Cloud based servers give you the option to scale up when demand peaks, an scale back down as it wanes, so you aren’t wasting resources.
