‘The Cloud’ in its many forms is now accepted and being embraced by an ever increasing proportion of organisations. The infographic demonstrates how the explosion in confidence and investment has occurred over the last few years.
It is no coincidence that the fastest growing small businesses are the early adopters of cloud technology and these is good reason for this. Cloud Technology helps to solve some of the critical challenges to growth facing SME’s; the access to capital and skills; scalability and management control through a period of rapid growth; maintaining innovation and continued improvement in the long term.
It is often referred to as a glass ceiling; business leaders expend disproportional effort and resources to make only marginal gains to the bottom line.
Cloud Technology is key:
Capital: Vast capital expenditure is not required and fixed costs such as IT infrastructure are replaced with the variable costs that in most cases are spread out on a monthly basis. IT infrastructure does not need to be built and paid for where your business may be in 3 years’ time and therefore capital is not wasted on spare capacity and only funds the immediate requirement of the business. Much needed capital can therefore be diverted to other business critical areas.
Skills: The valuable finite skills in your business in the shape of your staff can become much more productive; cloud technologies not only facilitate much more flexible working practices but also increases the flow of information between your organisation.
Scalability: Cloud computing in many cases provided near instant scalability. This may give your business a key competitive advantage in your marketplace or allow your business to experience rapid growth whilst not wasting time, effort, money and stress planning for slow to implement infrastructure changes.
Management Control: Cloud technologies enhance management control within time and resource constraints and are flexible enough to adapt to the needs of the business, enabling efficient management of a growing and more complex workforce.
Innovation: Cloud technologies allows flexible and low cost experimentation of new products which helps improve decision making amongst business leaders.
Continuing Improvement: Upgrades to cloud systems prevents a business from allocating resources to legacy / end of life issues.
