Cloud hosting/computing is a new term, at least when we compare it with the other kinds of hosting forms. This is also a new term for those who belong to the class of non-internet savvy technology professionals. It indeed is a brand new technology, which is slowly taking the shape of a prospect reliable enterprise solution and has very recently caught the attention of the mass. Of course, it’s not something new to the fortunate 500 companies, and the other corporate giants, but we’re talking about small businesses here. This technology has a blessing to many small businesses, especially the ones that are growing at a rapid rate. Cloud services for small business, which is limited to just couple of personnel, might not be a very great solution at the moment, but it can very easily turn into a great option when such small businesses flourish and multiply, having few satellite offices and personnel traveling all the time to get clients at a global level.
High Cost Factor Associated With VPNs
By making use of VPN, business owners can of course access their specialized applications, websites, work computers etc, but this kind of functionality comes at a steep price.
Costs associated with private networks, utility and other issues are normally beyond the scope of most of the small businesses and even many of the medium-size businesses. Before cloud hosting was introduced, these small businesses had to feel the brunt of having the overhead of owning IT staff, fail-safe procedures, server room, air-conditioning and above all the very expensive dedicated servers. The advantage of cloud hosting is that it can offer all this facility at just the cost of a single server room.
Security Issues
Security is the first thing people question when they even start thinking about cloud hosting. The fact remains that a big hosting company can always offer greater level of security than can be promised by a few local IT staffs; the simple reason behind is that they deal with heavy volumes and due to that they hire highly skilled professionals who are dedicated just towards the security concerns. A small business cannot obviously replicate that as even its IT staff is involved in many things apart from only the security aspect.
Just the way cloud offers grid computing, the highly skilled team of professional offer a big security blanket to ensure that all the information in the servers are kept confidential at all costs.
When Should a Small Business Owner Make a Move to the Cloud?
Cloud services for small business can again be an apt solution because of its flexibility to expand in a hassle-free manner. In case, the current hosting resources are not sufficient enough to meet the rising demands, the companies can always pay for more memory, more drive space, faster processors at any point of time; all this can be easily achieved without going through the hassle of transferring everything from existing machine to a new one.
All this discussion clearly indicates that cloud is obviously not the best solution for the business that you are going to start tomorrow or the one with just two or three business personnel, but it is definitely the way to go for those who’ve just got into the momentum going and are currently looking to expand, and convert into SMEs over next one year or so.
Do All the Americans Understand the Cloud Concept Quite Yet?
According to an interesting survey commissioned by Citrix, on 1,000 American adults, it was discovered that only about 17% of them actually related to the term cloud as computing network or a group of servers connected on the Internet, while majority of them still perceive cloud to be a “fluffy white thing”, or something related to sky or weather, which is quite astonishing, especially looking at the popularity of cloud computing in the recent times. Even more shocking was the next discovery of this survey, which revealed that 1 out of every 5 American (over 20%) admitted that he/she pretends to know what cloud is all about, and confessed that they strongly believe half of the people that they know of, simply refer to “cloud” in casual conversations pretending to be very knowledgeable, without really knowing how cloud works!
Cloud Providers Need to Focus on Spreading Awareness
Just about everybody uses social networking sites and online banking that run on the cloud networks, but a majority of the users still continue to be ignorant about the meaning and significance of cloud in computing terms. And, this pretty much applies to some of the small business owners too. As it’s fairly evident from the above survey, cloud computing providers definitely stand a good chance of generating business by educating those small business owners who are absolutely clueless about benefits of cloud at the moment, and the potential savings it can offer.
Therefore, if you’re a cloud computing vendor, you ought to put a good deal of effort on spreading awareness of benefits of cloud computing amongst the ignorant small business owners who can easily turn into potential customers without doing anything extraordinary. Instead of putting your money on advertising campaigns and traditional marketing, you may be better off running a slightly different campaign, conducting seminars, webinars, and local events to educate the small business owners about cloud hosting, with the intent of establishing contacts with them, and converting them into your potential clients.