Small business arena comes with a number of challenges. You need to be as effective as possible, offering new, interesting solutions, and always keeping pace with the industry, but you still have to think carefully about each new investment, as the budget for innovation is usually quite limited, especially if you are a startup. A lot of businesses of this type have found different cloud solutions to be an effective way of expanding their capabilities at an acceptable cost, which is why we decided to give you a short overview of the main advantages and disadvantages of these systems.
Security Issues
This is, currently, one of the main problems of cloud computing solutions. Defining the parameters of the cloud can be somewhat complicated, so people are not too eager to store their sensitive business data in the cloud. However, with the right precautions, like making sure that each of your employees has just the right type of authorization (i.e. has access only to the parts of data that he or she actually needs to be able to access), that you are using strong, unique passwords, only uploading or downloading the data through a secure connection, and that you have a chosen a reliable solution provider, your data should stay quite safe.
SaaS (Software as a Service) Solutions
This is the area of cloud computing that most small businesses can benefit from. Regardless of what it is that you do, chances are you need certain software to do it. If nothing else, most businesses can make use of a good piece of accounting software. If you obtained it through the usual means, buying it directly from the developer, you’d have to install the application on each of the PCs in your office that needs to use it, and you would have to have you IT staff work on application maintenance and updating, again, on each of the PCs. SaaS solution eliminate a lot of these problems. Your PCs don’t have to have hardware capable of running the app, as that is taken care of by the solutions provider (the applications use the resources of the cloud to run), updating and application maintenance is also done by the provider, and it affects all the instances of the app in your company simultaneously, which frees up a lot of time and allows your IT staff to devote their attention to more pressing matters.
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) Solutions
IaaS solutions provide you with an infrastructure that you can use to build your own, private cloud. While this can be a pricy solution, a lot of companies could benefit from having this kind of isolated cloud, that they could later even choose to connect to a public cloud, creating a hybrid.
Storage options
Companies that need to gather huge amounts of data could benefit from cloud storage options, not only because they are usually cheaper than physical storage, but also because they allow for easy sharing, and keep your data safe in case of a malfunction of your own hardware. If the information you are storing is particularly sensitive, you might want to encrypt it before sending it to the cloud, but this would limit your sharing options. One of the options that incorporates both is pCloud.
Scalability
Regardless of the solution you need, cloud solutions allow you to easily change your plan on the go, signing up for better plans as your requirements grow. This is to say that you won’t be wasting money on resources or features that you don’t need, but if a time comes when you do need them, they’ll be easily within reach.
