Small and Medium Businesses are the backbone of any country’s economy as they provide job opportunities and serve as engines for growth and innovation. And for firms like these, the value that cloud solutions can further add is likely to be overwhelming.
In the digital age today, with the rising number of remote workforce, moving to a cloud infrastructure seems like the best idea for any business. This is why more companies are turning to cloud computing. It is a trend that makes sense with numerous benefits, from the financial to logistical and operational, etc.
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It basically helps firms in staying connected by providing access to business data and applications from anywhere, at any time, on any mobile device, all at a reasonable price when compared to the cost of hosting servers in-house. And the fact is that the cloud helps small businesses in staying competitive within their market.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the many ways switching to the cloud can serve small businesses rightly. So, let’s begin.
1. Scalability and Flexibility
Cloud computing is a solution to your growing bandwidth demand. This is because with cloud-based services it becomes easy to scale up cloud capacity by drawing on the service’s remote servers. And likewise, if you need to scale down. This level of flexibility gives small businesses a real advantage over competitors by improving their overall operational efficiency. For example; When a company hires an additional workforce, they won’t have to purchase additional personal computers. They can just create new unique users for each new employee and they’re good to go! So, all an employee needs to remain productive is the correct login credentials.
Flexibility has a great way of enhancing the productivity and motivation of employees. And with the use of the cloud, small entities can even hire remote workers that are willing to work at much lesser wages as compared to regular employees who need to come up to work each day. With reports from the past, it was noted that small companies suffered huge losses while responding to unforeseen or temporary increase/decrease in demands. They were either forced to make capital expenditures on resources that would fail to bring long-term returns on investment or were forced to forego capitalizing on such opportunities. In both cases, the result was always unsatisfactory. This goes away with Cloud Computing.
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2. Reduced Costs
As a matter of fact, one of the most popular benefits of cloud computing is reduced costs. How? Firstly, it frees small businesses from having to make significant investments in costly hardware and the staff necessary to maintain it and instead allows small businesses to get on-demand access to industry-leading computing power and storage. This paves way for small businesses to enjoy quick and reliable applications and computational power, without the hefty price tag.
Secondly, cloud computing gives small businesses the power of shifting their spending from capital expenses to operational expenses that ultimately yield higher returns. Thirdly, by selecting the right cloud services, a small business’s IT costs can greatly be reduced by easing the pressure on this department and shifting focus from problem-solving to innovation. Lastly, thanks to the existence of subscription-based business models because small businesses no longer have to outlay large capital for IT soft hardware or storage hardware. A small company can simply pay as they move ahead. Adding to that, the ease of set-up and management, and suddenly intimidating IT projects look a lot more convenient.
3. Easy and Remote Access
Like we mentioned right at the beginning of the article, the number of remote workforces is rising to become a growing trend due to the effects of the pandemic. But the good part is that cloud computing is making it easier for companies to operate even in these unprecedented times. The fact is that almost all cloud services are available on responsive websites that handle well on any network-operated device like desktops, tablets, smartphones, etc. This is what makes it easy for small businesses to support distributed teams.
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4. Improved Collaboration
The workforce today is diverse and physically dispersed. This makes cloud solutions even more needful. That’s because the cloud helps in maintaining data centrally. With the use of cloud computing, the physical distance between employees does not seem to hamper the efficiency of teammates when a task or process has to be accomplished. The cloud instead makes it easier for employees to collaborate in real-time.
5. Security
Studies by several experts show that half of all cyber-attacks specifically target small businesses. And in order to close security gaps and tip the odds in your favor, cloud computing is a great solution. From the threat of ransomware and infected files to the danger posed by insider sabotage and disgruntled employees, security challenges are practically everywhere. This makes cloud storage important to reduce the number of security risks, giving you one less thing to worry about.
Talking about the benefits of cloud computing for small businesses to their security, secure file sharing, secure file storage, and secure data backup are the highlighting features. With cloud computing in place, file sharing is done via business-grade software instead of some risky consumer-grade file-sharing software. This alone improves the integrity of data and reduces the risk of cyber-attacks. Next, with professional cloud storage, you get to avoid the risk posed by storing files locally on mobile devices or laptops, which could become the target of physical theft any second. And finally, with the lack of a cohesive backup strategy, small businesses are always at a weak point. But again, cloud storage easily overcomes this issue. With the use of the cloud, backups are automated and you need not worry about any high sensitive files getting lost.
Conclusion: Cloud computing has actually been around for nearly two decades but has just grown in popularity over the past 5 years, thanks to our reliance on and increased use of data. With multiple benefits like scalability and flexibility, reduced costs, easy and remote access, improved collaboration, and security, it’s not hard to analyze that any small business can make progress with the help of cloud computing. It is an exciting opportunity for small businesses all around the world.
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