SMB Opportunities, and Risks, are Emerging from the CloudCrowds were a bit thinner on Thursday, the final day of this year’s 9th Cloud Expo trade show, but attendance was surprisingly high at my presentation on the topic of cloud computing for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs). I was a bit worried when almost no one was there at the 9:00 a.m. starting time. But within 10 minutes the room was packed with at least 50 interested and engaged people who kept me busy through the rest of the hour with a steady stream of questions and comments. This week a survey by Spiceworks, an IT social business network, suggested that cloud computing use is rising rapidly among SMB companies. Cloud services are now used by 46 percent of the 1,200+ companies surveyed worldwide, up significantly from the 28 percent that reported using cloud services in the first half of 2011. Wiredmagazine’s Jon Stokes suggested in a blog post today that SMBs are moving to the cloud faster than enterprises, mainly because of their lack of investment in legacy systems. “SMBs just don’t have a lot of baggage preventing them from moving to Google Apps, or Salesforce.com, or any of the other myriad cloud services on offer,” he wrote. Regardless of their reasons, there’s no question that SMBs are increasingly interested in cloud computing. And as I told my audience this morning, while the advantages of cloud computing are numerous, so are the potential risks. Potential advantages: • Ability to start and grow your business quickly. • Lower costs for system hardware and software. • Less time and money spent on updating applications. • Easy access to applications and data from different computers and devices. Risks: • Unreliable Internet connections can have severe consequences. • Data stored on the Internet may not be secure. • Cloud solutions can sometimes cost more than in-house solutions. • May lock you into proprietary applications or formats. • Unsatisfactory Web application service and support. Things to consider Before taking the leap into cloud computing,you need to carefully consider and quantify your needs for bandwidth, network security, servers and platforms and type of operating system. You also need to weigh how much data reliability your business really needs. Can it tolerate occasional outages of an hour or more, or is anything less than a fully redundant, high-availability system with replicated data in multiple locations unacceptable? Cloud computing is a great opportunity for small businesses to off-load the hassle and costs of IT management – as long as they can live with the disadvantages. Just don’t forget that, ultimately, you’re still responsible for your own data. And that meansyou need to have a backup plan for what to do when the cloud goes dark. Thanks from all of us here at StrataScale for reading our reports from the show. Until next time, so long!
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