Cloud, The enabler for small business?

One of the hottest technologies around right now is Cloud computing. You think about how Google has been able to turn the tables on traditional office and email applications like Microsoft Office, Exchange, etc. Granted they are still just a small percentage you see the impact and realization from the giants that they are now changing their models to match.

It is such a buzz word, yet still not understood by most people. So many get SaaS (Software as a Service) and Cloud confused. While I do not want to get into the differences here, let's just say SaaS can run on a Cloud. If that is not enough for you check out this article.

Many small businesses and specifically start-ups need to rely on technology just as much as larger businesses, but without the budget or personnel to do so. Both Cloud and SaaS have delivered models that can give the tools needed to compete and ran the day to day business at a much better value.

In the traditional client / server setup you have hardware to manage. Why some say this is not an issue, they may not be thinking about the infrastructure needed to support the traditional server model.

You obviously have to make sure the data can get to the users and be resiliant, so there is the networking you need to setup fot the server. Granted no matter what you have to have a network in place, but with the servers you need many additional ports and arguably a better network infrastructure.

Power and cooling are a major overlook by many customers. You can not just throw a bunch of servers in a room with out proper cooling and servers tend to be power hungry.

Hardware maintenance? Ouch is all I have to say about that. Having worked in many data centers, I can tell you nothing messes up your sleep worse than a pager going off at 3am because a power supply, hard drive, etc. has failed. Now as a small business you have to decide if you have on site staff or pay for a service. Either way it is a serious cost.

When you look at the Cloud and/or SaaS model you don't completely get a perfect world. There are still many risk involved. You always have that nice point of failure called the internet connection to worry about. If you can not get on the Internet you can not get to your data. It is however pretty resilient these days. However if you have business critical apps / services this may be too much of a risk.

Security is always an issue. How comfortable are you putting customer data on a Cloud or SaaS based service? Too me this is an area that has to be well thought out.

However when you get down to it you get some really amazing capabilites that can bring even the smallest businesses on par with the larger organizations. Cloud based architecture is extremely resilient since it is spread across hardware / servers and has no single points of failure. To do this in your own data center would cost you a fortune.

You do not have to have dedicated hardware support. You may have people for your software or application side however as it does not get you out of that.

You can grow or shrink the needed processing power on demand. Although virtualization can bring similar benefits to a traditional model, you can not just buy and sell hardware on demand.

Can a Cloud based service be everything for your business? Possibly, but slim in my opinion. I still believe you will need somewhat of a hybrid model where you move many things to the Cloud, but keep some key systems local. This could change in the future, but to me security of personal identifiable information for your customers is not something to be toyed with.

So is the Cloud and enabler for small business?

Absolutely!

There are many benefits and even with the concerns it allows small businesses to play on a much larger playing field.