Venyu Blog

In an increasingly competitive business climate where “just holding on” has become the new norm, every business — especially small and medium ones — need an advantage, an edge to keep the lights on, their computers humming and their business from flatlining.

More precisely, if you’re an SMB (e.g. David) squaring off against a larger opponent with deeper pockets than you do (e.g. Goliath) AND you have a distributed workforce spread over geographically disparate regions  AND you’re looking for a competitive advantage, consider cloud computing.

As laid out by this article in Cloud Tweaks, the public cloud allows smaller firms – those without the resources of larger corporations with seemingly infinite budgets – to enjoy enterprise level services, security and products, at a fraction of the price.

As detailed in the article these advantages include:

Simplified Set-Up. Instead of running desktops, applications, or voice through in-house servers, they are hosted on centralized virtual servers in a data center. The entire procedure consists of login, customize (for your environment) and begin.

Scalable applications, turnkey provisioning. With the public cloud you don’t need a copy of an app for every department using it, just one app resilient enough for everyone to customize for their own needs. In turn, you can immediately provision applications whenever you require them as the end user directly controls the resources they require. This allows organizations to adapt to the pace and dynamics of business by leveraging highly resilient virtual machines.

Anytime, anywhere access. No matter where in the world they are, employees can be networked cost-effectively with access to their individual desktop user profile from any device (e.g. mobile laptop, thin client or iPad) from anyplace in the globe. Over and through the cloud small organizations can effectively connect employees on their mobiles to deliver seamless, customer service as easily as a large corporation.

Secure, world class IT service delivery at minimum investment.  With all data and applications centralized in a data center it is vastly simpler to enable and enforce processes and procedures to ensure security, privacy and other best practices. No data is stored on a device so there is very little chance of proprietary data falling into the wrong hands if the device itself is lost, stolen or breaks.

Disaster Recovery—Keeping data safe by keeping it offsite and off your books. In an article in Forbes that also lays out the advantages to SMBs (and other company configurations) in migrating to the cloud, the author makes the point that when it comes to DR the advantage a cloud hosting provider has over an SMBs in-house set up comes down to money and resources. And when you come down to it, it just doesn’t make good business sense to safely host your own critical data. The investments required to host properly in-house include all of the following:

• Hardware firewall
• Software firewall
• Network Intrusion Detection System (IDS)
• Network Intrusion Protection System (IPS)
• Servers
• Server Rack
• Server Chassis
• Server Room with adequate cooling and air conditioning
• Uninterruptible Power Supply
• Fire Suppression System
• Operating System Licensing

Not surprisingly the conclusion rendered by the author is that with a cloud provider, you won’t need to spend a dime of capital on any of the above.

And for those small businesses just trying to get a foothold in the new norm, that has to be not just music to their ears, but also a concise and vivid score that enables them to keep their doors open and their business well, in business.

If you’re an SMB that’s ready to partially or entirely shift your server infrastructure and data backup and recovery to a reliable managed cloud service provider, contact Venyu today.