What Does Cloud Computing Have In Store for Small and Medium Business Enterprises

Cloud computing is no longer a name associated with big IT houses. The picture has changed dramatically in the past 5 years or so. From being a technology to collaborate different business procedures, cloud computing has evolved as the best resource for start-up companies, irrespective of their geographical location. Additionally, non-IT companies have started to leverage the use of cloud computing to run their business efficiently.  For example, the manufacturing sector wherein suppliers and manufactures work on a common global interface for collaboration thanks to cloud computing. But what really makes cloud computing the technology of the future is its potential to create new revolutions in the Small and Medium Business (SMB) sectors. SMB’s are predominantly relying on the Software as a Service (Saas) model of business, which is facilitated by cloud computing in conjunction with data virtualization. The reason is the huge reduction in infrastructure costs that requires much less hardware components to be installed in the premises of an SMB unit. According to a survey report by Gartner which states that the SaaS market which attained its peak value of $3.7 Billion in 2011 is all set to increase to nearly $10.5 Billion till 2014 making it perhaps one of the biggest enterprise service growth stories in recent times. Applications that are developed to support SaaS models are increasingly finding attraction among enterprises worldwide especially start-up companies, which look to gain the maximum advantage out of it. A recent survey report published by Techaisle stands as testimony to this growing affinity between SaaS solutions and SMB units. Going into the details of the survey, it was found that SMB’s were all in for the core business productivity tools that cloud based SaaS models had to offer. The main reason for that may be the cost of having to build such solutions by themselves. The world economy is not good. So financial stability is something that SMB organisations need to be assured before anything else as they are likely to face a big crunch if they do not have enough financial resources. So there is a need to reduce the initial capital investments made in infrastructure and care should be observed to ensure that the business consumes and pays for only what it needs i.e. wastage of resources should be avoided at all costs. Using cloud computing, it is possible for SMB organizations to schedule and organise the resources they actually need and they only have to pay for what they use. If they were to follow a business model of their own by investing in unique proprietary resources then chances are that several resources which are of no use for the business concerned may end up being bought along with the required resources and businesses even have to pay for them. Recently, Microsoft sponsored a study of about 3000 Small and Medium sized business enterprises from among 13 nations. The survey conducted by research firm Edge Strategies pointed out that SMB’s are ever more willing to adopt the benefits of cloud computing and they want to maximise their profits by virtue of adopting SaaS models to reduce capital expenditure. According to 54% of the surveyed SMB units, SaaS has reduced their expenses tremendously whereas 59% of the surveyed organisations reported an increase in productivity. 69% of them agreed that they have better forecasts for their business future thanks to adopting cloud based strategies and business models. Technical feasibility is definitely a reason why SMB’s are willing to adopt cloud computing more than any other enterprise resource management technology that we have seen before. Heads of SMB’s need not be responsible for hardware as well as software installation and maintenance as they are only using an interface, which provides them with all the necessary resources. Location independence, faster services, device independence, etc are all other key reasons why SMB’s prefer cloud-based business models today. So now you can clearly see that it is not only Big IT enterprises that can benefit from cloud computing but also small and medium business units as well.

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Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.   About the Guest Author: Mandira Srivastava is a fulltime freelance writer who specializes in technology, health and fitness, politics, and financial writing. Equipped with degree of mass communication and having worked for both private and corporate clients, I have experience meeting a wide range of writing requirements and styles.