Here’s seven great examples of how small businesses are using private clouds, an approach once only considered by large enterprises:
Applications updates: A regional specialty paper goods manufacturer found the software to accurately keep up with constantly changing sales tax rates and rules in the half-dozen states where the company sells products. The vendor keeps the software up-to-date, and the company can expand to new states effortlessly.
Customer collaboration: An accounting firm was expanding its CFO services to its SMB client base, but accessing and dealing with the wide variety of clients’ financial applications was proving infeasible. The answer was a cloud-based portal for ongoing communication and realtime financial updates. “CFO outsourcing” quickly grew to be over half the firm’s business.
Business continuity: After thieves stole a recycling company’s entire office computing setup of eight PCs, the company bought eight more the next morning and was back in business by noon. Information, applications, access—nothing had to be recreated because it was all running and backed up in the cloud.
Business communications: To compete with much larger firms, a risk management consultancy needed to use excellent communication and collaboration tools. A cloud-based suite—from messaging and e-mail to shared workspaces and online meetings—provides on-demand capability while reducing technology costs by thousands of dollars a year.
Business scalability: When a workforce scheduling and management firm moved to a hosted application for its sales force, it anticipated a 20 percent reduction in associated technology, training, and personnel costs. What it also got was steady IT costs even while the firm tripled its business.
A fresh start: When one of its products surged in popularity, a provider of multi-player games for mobile phones “hit a wall” when its own modest server facility was overwhelmed. The solution—in terms of revenue generation, customer satisfaction, and technology—was rapid conversion to pay-by-use cloud infrastructure.
Start-up: A company running online marketplaces for artisans and their products faced three challenges—geographic reach (the 10 employees are scattered across the U.S., and they are bringing local artisans to a national market), image storage (hundreds of thousands of images of arts and crafts), and payment processing (many relatively small payments called for automation, not clerks). For a company like this, cloud infrastructure and applications was by far the best way to start and grow a business while minimizing the co
