Is moving to cloud a better option for SMBs?

These days, cloud computing has become a popular buzz word among small and medium businesses as many of them are utilizing cloud services to cut down their cost of maintenance and infrastructure. The old method of storing data on hard drives and memory cards is now getting replaced by the advanced real time data access over the internet. Hosting the data in the dedicated data centers is more or less equal to cloud but differs in the data access. Data centers allow users to log in only through their corporate networks whereas in cloud, data can be accessed through internet from anywhere.

How SMBs can make use of cloud services:

Any company whether big or small, needs dedicated team for maintaining data security and support their corporate servers. Companies need to spend a fortune to have sufficient manpower and big infrastructures for holding these large sized servers. Many small and medium based companies running on low budgets, find it very difficult to invest for hardware installations and advanced software implementations. For them moving to cloud is more ideal than reality as they don't have to worry about capital and expertise that is essential for maintaining their own servers.

While some SMBs are adapting cloud computing into their business models to increase their efficiency and business growth, others are still ignorant in realizing the benefits of cloud in reshaping their business productivity. Let us see why moving to cloud is the coolest thing to happen for small and medium business enterprises:

• Flexibility and collaboration

  One of the important benefits of cloud is accessing work related files from anywhere, anytime and using any device. The traditional method of restricting files on a single server is no longer in practice today. Cloud has created flexibility of working from outside the organization as employees can access the data and documents easily from any remote place. The concept of having data at one central location is even more helpful for business owners and managers as they can analyze the projects and tasks with ease to streamline their business process. There is no need for the team to stay together who are working on the same project. Whether they are in office or at home, working on a laptop or smart-phone, all they need is a secured wi-fi connection to access the common information and stay efficient throughout the day.

• High security

  While many small firms recognize the importance of cyber security, very few of them know how to resolve it effectively when the situation of fraud arises. Generally, it is not possible for SMBs to establish secured infrastructure with their limited resources. Hence, small businesses are more vulnerable for data breaches and frauds than larger firms. Moving to cloud adds higher security for the business data, because the hosting companies use latest security platforms that protects the information from viruses, hackers and other network concerns.

• Cost-Efficient

  With cloud solution, small companies not only collaborate better but can reduce their infrastructure and maintenance cost significantly by moving their hardware and software needs to lower cost cloud services. Whether it is a well-established smaller enterprise or a medium based start-up firm, cloud allows businesses to employ advanced technical features for lower price. There is no need to invest on new servers or high-tech machines, and spend money on operational costs to run these machines for everyday business use. Using cloud, the expenditure on installing and integrating the infrastructure and software based projects into the existing systems can be minimized.

• Reliability

  Data in cloud is more secured and reliable than having it individually. Organizations - small or large maintaining data in their own servers need to hold the accountability in case of disasters caused by hacking and cyber threats. However, cloud hosting services come up with various disaster recovery plans with different bandwidth and network resources so that users can be redirected to different servers in case of outages. With very minimal costs, SMBs today can keep electronic copy of their information as a backup in the cloud, which can be used in the event of data loss due to natural or man-made catastrophes.

Smeph.net is a website about Small and Medium Entity Promotion in Hyderabad that contains exclusive articles, webinars, white papers & latest industrial updates to support and guide professional SMEs run their businesses successfully. We are thankful to professional SMEs like Marvist for helping in developing content to spread the awareness.

Vijay Kumar is experienced author; interested in writing blogs and articles on Smb methodologies and concepts.