For emerging businesses, the cloud offers an essential differentiator. For the first time, anyone with an idea can easily start a business and get it up and running as soon as possible on an enterprise-grade IT infrastructure. This infrastructure is flexible enough to accommodate growth, yet requires minimal up-front capital expenditure.

For small to medium-sized businesses that have limited IT operational resources, the cloud allows you to focus on running your business rather than investing high on high performance resources. You can take advantage of a wide portfolio of computing power, storage and network products. You can then cost-effectively scale on-demand as your business grows. Moving to the cloud can give benefits in the following five areas:

• Less Capital Expense

There is some debate about the value of shifting from a capital expense that is “CapEx” model to an operational expense “OpEx” model. The overall bottomline is that, specifically for short and midterm projects. The OpEx model is more attractive because there are no long-term financial commitments. In the OpEx model however, there is a zero upfront investment required. This allows organizations ranging from start-ups to well-established organizations to start projects faster than they used to but also end them without losing any major investments in the cloud services.

• Fresh Software

With SaaS short form for Software as a service. The latest versions of the applications needed to run the business are made available to all customers as soon as they are released. Immediate upgrades put new features and functionality into workers’ hands to make them much more productive. The best part is that software enhancements are typically released quite frequently. This is in contrast to homegrown or purchased software that might have major new releases only once per year or so and take significantly longer time to roll out in usage.

• Business agility

Getting the computing resources you need when you need them tends to shorten IT projects. This, in turn, results in less FTE to deliver the project and a quicker and more predictive time-to-market. Being able to deliver the demanded results faster, cheaper and with more quality might just give your business a high competitive edge and make your business more nimble on its feet. I have seen a data analytics project being reduced from 4 months to just 3 weeks, reducing the projects time-to-market and overall cost significantly.

• Disaster recovery

Businesses of all sizes should be investing in a robust disaster recovery plan, but for smaller businesses that lack the required cash and expertise, this is often more an ideal than the reality. Cloud is now helping more organizations buck that trend. Cloud backup solution is a key. According to Aberdeen Group, small businesses are twice as likely as larger companies to have implemented cloud-based backup and recovery solutions that save time, avoid large up-front investment and roll up third-party expertise as part of the whole business deal.

• New business models

It has never been much easier to start business innovation initiatives than it is with cloud computing, often enabled by readily available cloud it services. Utilization or effective combination of these services can result in a new and innovative business models which will generate new value propositions and will subsequently result in new revenue streams. There are even companies that are building entirely new business models and value propositions solely using cloud services. I see this last category especially in small and medium enterprises but also think of Spotify and BitCasa as a hint.

Not moved to the cloud yet?

Any three of the above benefits would be enough to convince many businesses to move their business into the cloud. But when you add up all five? It’s approaching no-brainer territory. Get your solution and be backed up anytime, anywhere all year around!