Small and mid-size businesses have a number of challenges that they must address in order to maintain a successful position in the marketplace. One of these longstanding issues is the difficulty these groups have accessing their important resources within online environments. However, the cloud has helped to mitigate many of these problems. That is why we are seeing a significant rise in SMB cloud adoption.
Overall, the adoption of cloud technologies has been on the rise in small and midsize companies around the globe. ZDNet reported that India in particular has been experiencing a considerable increase in smaller business cloud utilization. A recent EY and Assocham report found that cloud adoption among SMBs will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 20 percent through 2016.
“SMBs will play a leading role in the adoption of social, mobile, analytics and cloud in India, given the huge opportunity it opens up, not only to grow revenues by increasing marketing to new customers, but also by bringing in operational efficiency and customer experience,” the report stated, according to ZDNet.
Cloud benefits especially for SMBs
Indian SMBs aren’t the only ones deploying cloud services. Griffin noted that one of the main benefits of cloud technologies in the SMB sector is their cost effectiveness. Previously, many smaller organizations did not have the financial resources in place to afford IT infrastructure services including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. With these systems now offered in Web-based environments, however, they have become increasingly economical for small and midsize companies.
This cost-effectiveness also extends to the cloud’s potential for disaster recovery options. Instead of creating their own external database of mission-critical content ready in the event of a disaster, the cloud presents an online, accessible platform for business continuity planning in the small and midsize enterprise space.
Salesforce also noted that the cloud can also lead to a reduction in operating and maintenance expenses due to the interaction with a trusted service provider. Instead of carrying out the hardware and software updates manually within their internal processes, the cloud vendor is responsible for the continuous upgrade of the technology.
The importance of cloud performance
Bringing it full circle, the cloud can only bring these application performance enhancing benefits if its infrastructure performance is ensured. Unless the company’s cloud services are constantly reliable and accessible, users cannot reap all the advantages the technology offers. That means the company’s wide area network or Internet links must be robust and redundant.
Oftentimes, cloud performance hinges on the amount of network bandwidth an organization has available. If too many bandwidth-heavy processes are taking place at once, cloud performance can suffer. Likewise, if a company’s carrier links suffers service issues, cloud performance will suffer.
In order to guarantee the accessibility of the cloud, SMB decision-makers should take a look at the amount of bandwidth they are currently using, as well as the performance of their Web-based services. If cloud performance or the functionality of any other platform – including VoIP, videoconferencing, messaging or other mission-critical systems – is not as robust as it should be, administrators should increase bandwidth to improve performance. Thanks for a proliferation of options for DSL and other broadband services, adding bandwidth can be accomplished in budget-friendly ways. Companies should also ensure that they are using multiple communication links from more than one ISP or carrier to guard against the risk of service outages or line performance issues and provide automatic ISP failover. This way, all applications and content dependent on the cloud will operate efficiently, as they should.