Portal:Storage

Wikitip

Cloud Will Allow the Smallest Companies to Compete Against the Largest

My previous article about the 3 greatest reasons to move to the cloud made me realize that one of the main advantages Cloud providers offer for smaller companies is to be able to compete against their large competitors. Cloud computing is leveling the playing field between large enterprises and SMBs. Now a SMB can afford the same infrastructure as a large enterprise. This might sound a bit far-fetched but I believe that it really makes sense and there is evidence of this.

Here are, in my opinion, the main facts: If we think about how much investment was traditionally needed to support millions of users in a scalable and secure environment we could see how this might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in addition to an IT department to manage. In the past, smaller companies needed large investments to afford such an infrastructure. In an elastic environment you only pay for what you use and this utility based pricing includes the infrastructure and management.

To add to this point, think of the situation of a smaller company going head to head with a large competitor. If the larger company would mention how large, secure and redundant their infrastructure was, it would most likely eliminate the smaller provider. But now, using an IaaS managed provider a smaller company can prove that they are as scalable, secure and redundant as their large competitor and pay for these advantages as a utility, not by investing in large upfront capital infrastructure costs. Now that cloud computing has leveled the playing field, the main differences between a companies offerings will be marketing and execution.

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