Nearly all businesses use the cloud for some portion of their operations. But what many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) don’t realize is that a cloud-first strategy can be beneficial. Here’s how.
First: What Is a Cloud-First Strategy?
A cloud-first strategy is when your business moves all of its digital infrastructure to the cloud. Instead of an onsite server, everything is digital, even mission-critical applications and secure information. If you’ve been maintaining servers for the past decade or so, this can seem radical. But for many businesses the idea of putting everything in a physical location is dangerous, oddly limiting, and even dated. Server space and computational power is more and more thought of as a utility. You can increase or decrease the amount you pay for with the click of a button. Imagine living in a house that goes from a single water well to being connected to the city’s water system. That’s roughly analogous to going from your own server to cloud computing.
So, Why Choose a Cloud-First Strategy?
There are many reasons to choose a cloud-first strategy. Different reasons will take on different importance for each business, but many of these reasons are compelling.
Configurability
How do you want to arrange your digital infrastructure? However you want. Granted, you can configure a physical server how you want—if you have the time to take it apart and build it, the money to buy new pieces as needed, and the ability to stop doing business while you reconfigure. With cloud computing, you spend the capital money and let the cloud provider worry about configuration. Or you move digital pieces around at your leisure.
Disaster-Proofing
Disasters small and large—from power surges to fires—can threaten a physical server. And the cloud resides on a physical server somewhere. But cloud computing facilities are disaster-proofed, with redundant wiring, power backups, fire suppression systems, and more. Plus, they build in digital redundancy. You may not even know if your cloud provider has been hit with a disaster, as one of their other facilities will kick in and keep providing your service.
Price
The upfront costs of a cloud-first strategy can look a bit iffy. But remember, pricing by cloud providers is transparent. You pay a set price per amount used.
By contrast, the costs to maintaining a physical server can add up. Aside from the equipment, rental space, cooling, IT staff, and more, maintaining a server can be an expensive endeavour. On top of that, you have to consider the costs of upgrading, which is not an infrequent event.
Reliability
If you maintain physical servers, someone must maintain them. For SMBs, it’s not at all unlikely that you only have one or two people to do so. Imagine having a service problem when your IT person is on vacation. The reality of hardware is that it has downtime, and the reality of managing an SMB is that paying for someone to be on call 24/7 can be a little much.
By choosing a cloud-first strategy, you solve this problem. The cloud provider takes care of service and maintenance 24/7. If there’s a problem on a server after you’ve left for the day, you don’t have to worry about getting called back in to solve it. The cloud provider solves the problem.
Scalability
The biggest benefit of cloud computing is scalability, no question. Your cloud provider can bump you up to the next service tier with a phone call, a click of a button, or even automatically if they’re detecting that you need additional resources. Traffic spikes or applications with high computational needs aren’t a problem. If you need more capacity, you pay more and get it right away.
It’s Time to Embrace the Cloud
Whether you’re just storing information or you’re running powerful applications, a cloud-first strategy offers benefits such as superior configurability, smarter disaster-proofing, and a better ability to scale than running physical servers. If you’re a small or medium-sized business, you need every possible advantage, and a cloud-first strategy offers these major advantages.
