6 Reasons Why SMEs Should Adopt Cloud-based Services

If you’re an SME owner wondering how cloud-based services can transform your business, you’ve come to the right place.

According to Parallels SMB (Small and Medium Businesses) Cloud Insights for Global Markets 2016™, the market for Cloud services is expected to grow to $125 billion by 2016. 67% of the share will be of business applications and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers.

For SMEs, cloud offers a smarter and leaner technology option that limits cost and multiplies productivity. Cloud offers many straightforward benefits to SMEs – improved data security, reduced downtime, flexible storage, CRM management, resource optimization, and remote computing to name some. 

As a business owner, you’re constantly searching for ways to stay relevant and maximize profit without compromising on quality, cost, and efficiency – Cloud offers you a promising solution to meet all these goals! 

Let’s dive right in and explore some of the advantages of cloud migration for your business:

Simplified Software Management:

Hosting applications on the public cloud eliminates significant management requirements. Not long ago, if your organization wanted to use a new software platform, there were several steps involved. First, you’d purchase the software and the appropriate number of licenses. 

Then you’d obtain the hardware needed to host it, manage the installation, and deal with any data migration and security issues. It was a major undertaking and, in many cases, would need to be repeated regularly as software updates demanded.

Public cloud computing makes it easier to embrace Software as a Service (SaaS) models. Applications hosted on the public cloud offer simple management. Upgrades and updates are handled by the cloud provider, eliminating significant work for your IT team. 

You’ll always have the ability to access the latest software features or ensure that an updated patch has been installed, while your team is free to focus on higher strategic areas.

Remote Computing:

A compatible device and a working internet connection are all you need to get started with cloud! Cloud technologies allow you to work from anywhere at any time – this is especially useful for small businesses who keep changing office space every now and then. 

Working remotely also gives massive flexibility to part-time professionals – they can go home and work from there, making the most of their time. 

Flexibility

Cutting costs and maximizing profits is a vital objective for any SME owner looking to expand their business. Cloud technology offers that opportunity to you – Through pay-as-you-use doctrine, your firm can save significant money on investment.

By employing cloud in a business model, SMEs escape the trap of advance payments, a condition that affects business growth adversely. Cloud technology is ideal for the ever-changing financial dynamics of SMEs, offering the ability to scale up or down at any time without incurring any extra costs. 

Security

Security breaches are a public threat that every firm has to tackle. However, they have severe repercussions on the brand image when it comes to SMEs. They have the pressure of establishing goodwill in the market and standing out to flourish. 

According to the law of diffusion, businesses first need to earn the trust of innovators and early adopters (comprising 16% of the target market) to survive and become successful. Data security plays a crucial role in earning this trust. 

Cloud technology greatly enhances the security levels of the company’s data. In the cloud, it is the experts who take command of your data to encrypt and secure them from the reach of hackers. An additional advantage of choosing cloud is that your data is always backed-up. 

Scalability 

Cloud services are highly scalable and reliable. SMEs can strategize a steady and planned growth by the use of cloud solutions. As your company expands to other locations and builds its team, you can scale up to the next level of services by adding users and servers immediately. 

There’s absolutely no need to purchase any other software. It’s just like renting an extra room. Based on the specific requirements of your business, you can scale up or scale down. For example, if you are planning to launch a viral online campaign and expect a lot of traffic to your business website or application, then you can scale up for few days, and as soon as the traffic returns to normal, you can again scale down to your actual plan.

Cloud solutions are more reliable than traditional software. There is no upfront cost, zero investment, and very less maintenance. Another important feature which makes cloud systems more reliable is automatic software updates. 

Cloud migration in action

To help you plan your cloud migration strategy, we’ve put together two case studies which demonstrate the power of cloud in real time:

Spotify

Spotify (est. 2006) is a media services provider primarily focused on its audio-streaming platform, which lets users search for, listen to, and share music and podcasts.

Migration Objective

Spotify’s leadership and engineering team agreed: The company’s massive in-house data centres were difficult to provision and maintain, and they didn’t directly serve the company’s goal of being the “best music service in the world.â€Â 

They wanted to free up Spotify’s engineers to focus on innovation. They started planning for migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in 2015, hoping to minimize disruption to product development, and reduce the cost and complexity of hybrid operation.

Migration Strategy and Results

Spotify invested two years pre-migration in preparing and assigning a dedicated Spotify/Google cloud migration team to oversee the effort. Ultimately, they split the effort into two parts: services and data, which took a year apiece. 

For services migration, engineering teams moved services to the cloud in focused two-week sprints, pausing on product development. For data migration, teams were allowed to choose between “forklifting†or rewriting options to best fit their needs. Ultimately, Spotify’s on-premise to cloud migration succeeded in increasing scalability while freeing up developers to innovate.

 To read more: The Significance of Microsoft Azure in Enabling IIoT

Gitlab

GitLab (est. 2011) is an open core company that provides a single application supporting the entire DevOps life cycle for more than 100,000 organizations.

Migration Objective

GitLab’s core application enables software development teams to collaborate on projects in real time, avoiding both handoffs and delays. GitLab wanted to improve performance and reliability, accelerating development while making it as seamless, efficient, and error-free as possible. 

While they acknowledged that Microsoft Azure had been a great cloud provider, they strongly believed that GCP’s Kubernetes was the future, calling it “a technology that makes reliability at massive scale possible.â€

Migration Strategy and Results

In 2018, GitLab migrated from Azure to GCP, so that GitLab could run as a cloud-native application on GKE. They used their own product to migrate the data, initially mirroring the data between Azure and GCP. 

Post-migration, GitLab reported improved performance (including fewer latency spikes) and a 61% improvement in availability.

Ready to deploy a holistic cloud migration strategy and revolutionize performance? We’re here to help. As a reputed cloud services provider, we educate clients about cloud technology and empower them with advanced solutions to transform their conventional processes. 

With 14 years of skin in the game, Hakuna Matata team has deep expertise in improving data storage and accessibility for clients through custom cloud solutions.

So, what are you waiting for? Schedule a free consultation and migrate to the cloud now.