Impact of cloud computing on the growth of SME

Though everyone dreams of growing their business to a corporate scale, the truth is that the major segment of today’s economy is constituted by small and medium-scale enterprises commonly known as SMEs. The growth of these SMEs is restricted by their own capacities and inabilities to scale up in the face of unprecedented business opportunities. This very area is what cloud computing caters to. Cloud computing is a host of services that includes dedicated and managed cloud-based VPS hosting, and computing solutions. With the advent of cloud hosting and cloud computing, SMEs have started to gain footholds and leapfrogged over competition to achieve the business growth they forecasted. Let us see how this has become possible:

With cloud computing, SMEs can dynamically adapt to the changing business scenarios. Volatile situations, such as recessionary conditions can cause many an enterprise to lose business and run the risk of its liabilities outweighing its profits. With cloud computing, SMEs can now customise their cloud based infrastructure resources in real time to tailor their needs according to the current circumstances.

Cloud hosting provides a pay-as-you-go service option that enables SMEs to establish a cap on their spending. It also provides efficient management solutions, such as managed VPS hosting so that businesses can concentrate their efforts towards achieving growth, rather than being caught in the managing and maintaining their infrastructure.

The current surge in Ecommerce is a perfect example. SMEs dealing in online retailing via e-warehouses and payment gateways cannot afford glitches and slow traffic to ruin their business. Additionally, seasonal variations may drive additional traffic to an online store, which puts additional pressure on the servers. In case of a physical IT infrastructure managing additional traffic pressure might become cumbersome as you would have to buy additional resources like servers and get more bandwidth. But, with cloud services all you need to do is get more space and bandwidth from your cloud service provider. Once the business spike is over, you can even scale back to lower resources, thus efficiently optimising resource utilisation.

The wide variety of cloud service providers offers enough variety for SMEs to actually choose a vendor for cloud-based VPS hosting or other services, such as SaaS, PaaS or IaaS. The choice of these services depends on the SME’s need for just software that they cannot afford to license, software platforms on the cloud, or the entire network and server infrastructure.

Some cloud service providers have tailored their offerings for SMEs by providing full administrative privileges for servers, operating system choice, software application choice and configuration flexibility. Some even provide automatic failover switching in case of natural calamities or disasters.

With all these evident advantages, it is no surprise that cloud computing and cloud hosting in particular is having such a great impact on the exponential growth of SMEs. The near future may see many businesses grow to the scale of corporate enterprises at a fraction of the cost incurred by the big boys.