What Has The Cloud Ever Done For Small Businesses?

When historians and sociologists look back on the last decade or so, they face the task of explaining what caused an immense explosion of disruption and innovation in the business world. Startups come out of nowhere and grow to challenge industry giants. Billions of dollars are generated by smart founders who can capture lightning in a bottle. There has always been innovation, but there’s something quantitatively different in its pace and heterogeneity in the modern era.

As with any complex phenomenon, there are many explanations for the era of entrepreneurial ingenuity we are living through, but the lowering of barriers is a crucial factor. The internet lowered the barrier to communication. The cloud made it possible for anyone with an idea to access the servers and infrastructure they need to test that idea against reality. The startup scene understands how the cloud powers innovation, but the same isn’t true of many small business owners. I talk to a lot of small and medium business owners and IT executives about their infrastructure, and I’m struck by how few have a deep understanding of what a cloud platform can do for them.

The core value proposition of the cloud for SMEs is this: access to enterprise-grade infrastructure in a world-class data center without having to pay for it upfront. Small businesses reliant on server rooms and small on-premises data centers stocked with ancient and expensive servers — a situation more common than you might think — would benefit enormously from a migration to the cloud. The infrastructure is better, and it doesn’t have to be paid for in advance.

But that’s not the only benefit. Cloud servers can be deployed at will and destroyed just as quickly — even better, cloud server deployment and configuration can be automated. If it’s not clear why that’s a good thing, think about the benefits of being able to deploy a new server with a known configuration whenever you need it for testing, staging, continuous integration, or for scaling. Ephemeral servers will change the way you think about enterprise infrastructure.

Speaking of scalability, it’s so much easier to spin up a cloud server than to procure and deploy physical hardware. Scaling can be automated too, so it’s fairly trivial to spin up additional cloud servers as and when they’re needed. If your business has its own server room, consider the difference it might make to your business if you could physically grow and shrink that space as the need for computer and storage resources waxes and wanes.

By migrating to cloud servers, small businesses benefit from everything else that comes along with hosting servers in an enterprise-grade data center: redundant connectivity, impeccable security, consistent power, and outsourced management of the physical infrastructure. All that for a price significantly lower than dedicated hardware.

Next time you need to refresh your business’s IT infrastructure, think about the cloud.