Role of Cloud Technology in Small to Medium Businesses
With the right skills, setting up an online business has become a lot easier than in the past. While this is good news for small business owners, it is important to note that competition is a lot more stiff than it has ever been. Therefore, it is important to ensure that you launch your products to be efficient, cost effective and scalable. It is also important to ensure that the product can be constantly improved and developed.
When it comes to SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses, cloud technology has revolutionized how products and services are created and offered to the customers. The following are ways that companies can harness cloud technology to provide more value to customers, at a faster pace and while keeping costs under control.
Innovation and agility
The advent of cloud technology significantly increased the extent of innovation that can be done by companies with limited resources. This is because of the combination of cloud services provided by companies like AWS, GCP, Azure etc., and tools that facilitate agile project management like Jira and Zenhub.
It is advisable to ensure that your organisation has an agile project manager who understands the tools, techniques and methods used in agile project management methodologies like scrum.
DevOps and Continuous Development
One of the main benefits of cloud technology, especially as your business thrives and your team grows, is DevOps and CI/CD. In simple terms, instead of designing and making applications as huge monolithic projects, it is possible to continuously develop your application and continuously put updates in the hands of your customers.
Cloud solutions like AWS’s Pipelines allow you to set up a system where different developers on the team can develop different parts of the app, test them locally, commit changes to the code base, build a test server to test the integrated changes and ultimately deploy and deliver the changes to the main application that the customers use. This facilitates innovation, quick response times and a clean, well tested and well documented code base.
Cost Reduction and Flexibility
The benefit of cost reduction can not be overstated as reducing your expenses (bottom line) is important for any business which seeks to make a profit. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and AWS, once stated that cloud services are like the electric grid. Where instead of building your own power station (analogous to servers and compute power), you can use and only pay for the amount of power you need. Cloud services like AWS allow you to fine-tune the infrastructure used by your application. This allows you to choose the perfect setup based on cost, speed, scalability, access frequency etc. You can even go as far as paying a fraction of storage costs for files that might need to be archived for compliance but are accessed infrequently. Services like AWS S3 glacier allow for this.
Global reach and Scalability
Because cloud providers have infrastructure spread all over the globe, you can deploy your servers in the most optimal location. For example, developers in Asia can use services in Southern Africa if the users of the application are mostly from that region. This reduces latency and increases the speed of your application. Other benefits of global reach include cost optimization and compliance (which will be explained in the next section).
Security and Compliance
Starting with the aspect of security, cloud providers offer enterprise level security which can also be fine-tuned based on the requirements of the application . You can fine-tune the amount of access each user has to your system and this can include multi tiered systems where the public facing layer is open but security increases as you go to the back-end layer and becomes even more strict as you move to the database layer.
This barely scratches the surface of the security that is offered by cloud infrastructure.
Moving on to compliance, some countries have laws that require information of their citizens to be stored in particular physical locations. For example, if I am designing an application made for American users and I am in a different country, I can still ensure that the data is stored on servers in the US so my application remains compliant. Personally identifiable data also requires extra security and all this can be implemented fairly easily using cloud services.
Big data and Analytics
Data lakes are some of the most beneficial elements of cloud technology. Essentially, you can collect large amounts of data that may be useful in the future, store it at a low cost and aggregate, compile and sort the data to provide useful business insights. You can also incorporate your data with relevant data from third parties to obtain a wholistic view. Examples of useful data can be heat-maps for your websites to know where customers hover the most so you know which parts to optimize or where to place promotions for maximum interaction. You can even collect data from various IoT sensors that are spread out over large areas.
The key takeaway is that there is almost no limit to the amount of data you can collect and there is no limit to the useful insights you can obtain from that data.
Conclusion
The list given here barely scratches the surface but was created to give an idea of the capabilities of cloud infrastructure and how you can use cloud technology in your company.
Golden Arc Consulting
