A study conducted by Intuit and Emergent Research shows that by 2020, approximately 80% of small and mid-sized business enterprises will fully adopt cloud computing. Currently only 40 percent of the small enterprise have adopted cloud computing. Though cost effectiveness is one of the reasons behind the adoption of cloud-based services, there are many cloud-computing features that the small businesses can turn to their advantage. The pace at which technology is changing is posing a challenge to the small and mid-sized businesses to retain a full time in-house expertise to maintain and manage their IT infrastructure and communication needs.
Reasons Why Small and Medium Business Need Cloud
Support for Remote Work- Cloud collaboration suits small and mid-size ventures that have remote workers as well as contractors for specialized tasks. It’s possible to connect and share data with team members as well as collaborators working from different geographical locations in real time. Cloud based collaboration tools enable superior project management as well as workflow. As per a study by Software Advice businesses favor web-based solutions over solutions needing onsite deployment.
Moving Telephone Support to Cloud-based Service- Telephone services are a vital component of all business communication strategies. Several companies implement more than one telephone network or mesh their telephone network with their networking data infrastructure. Outsourcing to a hosted telephone solution lets businesses concentrate on making calls instead of troubleshooting quality or connection problems. The cloud vendor will not only report problems but communicate with the Internet Service Provider to resolve problems along with supplying with multiple on-demand features.
Scalability- This is an important issue concerning all companies. If the small business does well , it will require more hardware/software and hire more people to cope up with the demand. On the other hand, if the business is poor the small business will require less hardware software and people to run it. It’s impossible to predict a small business’ performance in the future. It doesn’t make sense to go for online deployment. Cloud collaboration makes scalability easier. The small business can increase the package if the situation demands and vice versa.
Backup Solution- In Cloud solutions the data is safe even if there are manmade or natural disasters. All the files and data are stored at the cloud location. So if any unforeseen event happens at the physical location of the small business their information is safely secured at the cloud location.
User-Friendliness- The cloud solutions can be operated even by a layman. You don’t need to be a software expert to use and understand cloud solutions. Maintenance issues are taken care at the Cloud premises. Hence, the small business owners do not have to worry about or resolve maintenance issues.
Cloud solutions are clearly the future choice for small businesses. With time cloud based solution are evolving and getting better and better. If a small business is not using cloud now is the right time to do so. Benefits will be reaped right away and in the long term will help the business grow and thrive significantly.
