Pie-In-The-Sky Computing, A. K. A. The Cloud

For decades, small businesses have been crying out for cheaper computing and for decades, their requests went unanswered. But with the rise of the cloud, it’s all change. Cloud computing has a funny way of reducing business costs and generally making working with computers easier. The new platform doesn’t require businesses to spend as much time maintaining their systems. And it makes it far less likely that they’ll suffer a network outage, thanks to the fact that their computing resources are provided by a professional, external company.

Oh, and did I mention it can save you money too?

No Redundancy

Last decade, businesses went through constant computing upgrade cycles. Every couple of years, new systems and processors came out, and they had to upgrade their software and hardware to keep up. But now, thanks to the fact that computers are basically fast enough for most business functions and the fact that cloud software gets updated remotely, businesses no longer have to schedule costly redundancy cycles. Instead, all the updates happen externally and are performed by people who really know what they’re doing.

On top of that, the cloud offers businesses more resilience too. In the past, businesses had to backup their data every week on external hard drive, just in case something went wrong. Now, though, all that backing up is done automatically by cloud service providers, allowing businesses to get on with the job.

Lower Storage Costs

Buying and maintaining a bunch of hard drives was expensive for businesses. Not only did they have to buy hard drives all the time to store their data, but they also had to schedule the purchase of new hard drives after a few years, just in case the integrity of the data stored on old hard drives began to break down.

Now, though, things like Azure file storage have made storing information a lot cheaper. Companies no longer have to buy their own hard drives. They can just save their data to a bunch of external servers, which costs them very little and is a lot more secure than older methods.

Low People Costs

When it comes to computing, the biggest cost businesses face is the cost of hiring people to manage it. According to the data, more than half of the average business’s IT budget gets spent on the staff who maintain it. The reason for this is because getting hold of good IT professionals is hard. It turns out that there aren’t an awful lot of them, and so businesses have to compete to get the best people. On top of that, businesses have to spend money on recruiting and marketing, which can cost a fortune.

Of course, when you move to the cloud, you’re still effectively hiring people to maintain your systems. But it often turns out to be a lot cheaper than hiring somebody yourself. Cloud companies make very efficient use of their people, meaning that they’re constantly working to solve problems somewhere in the system. Small businesses often find it difficult to keep IT staff completely busy.