Cloud Computing — Overcoming challenges for Small Businesses

Small businesses are too big to ignore! According to Statistics Canada, 97.9% of businesses in Canada are Small businesses(1–99 employees) and 1.9% are medium-sized businesses (100–499 employees). Needless to say, SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) are highly important to the Canadian economy. Irrespective of the size, every business wants to succeed. It is recognized that the use of Information Technology (IT), is very critical to the operation of all businesses, including SMBs. In recent years, SMBs are relatively behind as compared with large businesses in adopting the latest innovations in IT such as Cloud computing, real-time business intelligence using AI & ML, robotics, etc. The perceived barriers are due to the complexities, skills requirements, and cost concerns. The purpose of this article is to highlight the benefits of Cloud Computing for SMBs.

What are the challenges?

The most common challenges for SMBs are:

Cash Flow

Stable cash flow is often the biggest problem for small businesses. Many times, small business owners give up their salaries to pay their employees and vendors. And, sadly, there are many stories of small businesses failing because they ran out of funds.

Time to experiment

I have seen small business owners, wearing multiple hats. They are both working on and in the business! Usually, it takes a long time, before you can get their time to talk for a few minutes. This time crunch is a huge barrier when it comes to experimenting with newer things.

Shortage of Skills

Technology will play a crucial role in helping SMBs gain the flexibility and agility that’s needed to adapt and position the business as post-pandemic days unfolds. SMBs must tap into key technology trends that can help them make the necessary pivots to come back stronger despite the ongoing uncertainty. The challenge is the shortage of employees, especially employees skilled in the latest technologies.

Digital Strategy

According to the research by Small Business Group, SMBs are turning to technology to fuel new business initiatives. Basic electronic commerce capabilities such as the telephone, facsimile, e-mail, internet, social media, web presence are now well within the reach of even the smallest companies, which allows SMBs to compete with the larger players. Importantly, the ability for new technology to make them stand out from the crowd is perceived as a good investment. I reckon, there shouldn’t be any business strategy without a digital strategy.

How to overcome the challenges?

A simple way to overcome the challenges would be to find a solution that offers:

• No Upfront Cost
• Faster Implementation
• Experiment often
• Focus on business value

Based on the top 2021 trends, The Cloud is the clear choice for SMBs. As per the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST), cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

What are the benefits of the Cloud?

Cloud computing provides a simple way to access servers, storage, databases, and a broad set of application services over the Internet.

Pay as you Go Pricing Model

Instead of having to invest heavily upfront in buying infrastructure resources before you know how you’re going to use them, you can pay only when you consume computing resources, and pay only for how much you consume. Cloud computing lets you focus on your business problems, rather than on the heavy lifting of racking, stacking, and powering servers. Rather than investing upfront capital, it lets businesses span the cost based on the actual usage.

Increase Speed and Agility

Ordering computing resources, setting them up, and making them available for business use takes a long time. Resources can be created online and made available in a matter of a few minutes. They can be created either manually or programmatically and depending on the type of resource, there can be no limit to the number of resources one can create. As a result, businesses can experiment faster and in the worst-case, can fail faster, at a cheaper cost.

Rapid Elasticity

The problem with buying resources on-premises is you have to guess the correct size based on the maximum usage. As a result, resources will be idle, when the demand is minimum. Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time.

Go Global in minutes

The success of the business should not become the bottleneck. Based on the business success across the globe, one should be able to quickly replicate IT infrastructure in a matter of minutes. Automating the scaling of IT resources based on business success is key to avoiding deteriorating user experience. Security, reliability, performance efficiency, operations excellence, and cost-optimization are the architectural pillars of cloud technology that directly address mission-critical enterprise demands.

Summary

The key question is how best to evolve a business strategy for SMBs that can make a significant impact upon the local economy. A sober strategy that sets realistic expectations, taking care not to under-achieve, is required. The real long-term benefits of IT for SMEs should come from newer technologies that place greater emphasis upon plug/play hardware and load/go software. If this is achieved it will significantly reduce the IT support burden on small businesses.

Based on the benefits of cloud computing and the challenges faced by SMBs, there should be no business strategy without the cloud strategy. The plan must be to maximize business benefits while minimizing effort and cost. Successful cloud migrations require organizations to adopt a smart mindset. Each business must tailor its plan based on business objectives, resources, timing, requirements, and capabilities.

No matter what, the business should be always up & running! The success of small & medium-sized businesses is extremely important for the success of the national economy. The bottom line is, Think Big For Small Businesses!