What Small Businesses Need To Consider When They Go Cloud
Many small businesses are heading to the cloud. This is a fact, considering cloud computing companies are some of the fastest growing in the tech world now. Cloud computing offers promise for lower costs, heightened IT efficiency and security. Truth be told, even though the mentioned benefits are valid, cloud computing is not as glamorous as you might think. As a small business, all factors remaining constant, you must understand the ideal way to manage the benefits for optimal performance. Lower costs don?t necessarily mean efficiency. The following tips should get you there the smart way.
Keep your bandwidth efficient
Cloud computing technology runs on the internet. Speed matters. The bandwidth that is offered for whatever product or function your business adds on the cloud should be the most important factor when you select a provider. For example, when you have a small bandwidth yet your small business website is huge, the overall product will be extremely slow.
You have to ensure the bandwidth you are allocated works fast for you. It should be clearly define to ensure that your business runs optimally. Of course there are other factors you should also consider like reliability, outages, support and so forth.
Back up for all data
The world we live in is full of uncertainties. Changes happen every now and then. Some of them are positive while others-negative. When your small business makes a move to the cloud to leverage the opportunities there, you need to have a backup plan for negative eventualities. The backup is twofold. You must have a backup plan businesswise and technically just in case something negative happens in the cloud. Some of the questions you must have answers to at this stage are how you can reclaim you data if something goes wrong (it always does), how long such a lock down would take and if the provider will be available to help you move to another provider and so forth.
Security plans for the future
As you and similar small businesses join the cloud, sooner rather than later, the platform will be compromised. Rather, cloud security will become critical, but vulnerable than it is today. When this happens, what contingencies do you have to deal with this?
Small businesses need to realize that the threats are real and they will come to pass. You need to work closely with your cloud solution provider to ensure that any security breach or threat is dealt with immediately its detected.
Be realistic about expectations
When most small businesses shift their business model to the cloud, pomp is what drives them. They imagine they can kill all birds with one stone. That all problems are solved, lower operation costs, huge profits and so forth. Whereas this is attainable, the opposite could be true. Your business could be wiped out in a day if something goes wrong. Small businesses need to create a plan to manage expectations, model growth and avert risks each time when their businesses are in the cloud. This can really help them optimize their cloud experience.
By Walter Bailey
(Disclaimer: CloudTweaks publishes news and opinion articles from different contributors. All views and opinions in these articles belong entirely to our contributors. They do not reflect or represent in any way the personal or professional opinions of CloudTweaks.com or those of its staff.)
Source: http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2012/09/what-small-businesses-need-to-consider-when-they-go-cloud/
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