According to a Spiceworks survey of over
1,500 IT professionals, the smaller the company, the more willing they are to
adopt cloud computing technology.
38 percent report that they plan to adopt cloud computing within the
next 6 months.
While we focus on cloud
computing adoption by the Global 2000 and the government, the reality is that
small businesses have been on the cloud for years, and continue to fuel the
largest and most rapid growth around the cloud. They were the first to adopt SaaS earlier this decade,
driving the rapid growth of SaaS providers such as Salesforce.com. Now SMBs are looking to drive much of
their IT into the cloud, largely around the cost benefits.
While the larger
enterprises and government agencies attempt to sort out issues around security,
privacy, compliance, and, that all-important control, the decision to go cloud
for small businesses is a no-brainer.
They can't afford traditional IT, in many cases. Lacking the "cloud option," most SMBs would
do without core enterprise systems such as CRM, ERP, calendar sharing, e-mail,
and even business intelligence. Now,
all of these can be had out of the cloud for a few dollars a day.
In addition, the
availability of clouds that provide IaaS, such as Amazon Web Services, GoGrid,
and Rackspace, have opened the gates for small technology-oriented startups to
rent virtual data centers and avoid the million or so dollars needed to make
capital expenditures around hardware, software, and renting data center space. Many tech startups have no infrastructure
to speak of on-premise, and leverage the savings in capital to drive faster and
more effective product development efforts. When I was running small startups, you figured a million
dollars minimum just to get ready for development. With the cloud computing options today, that's money you can
leverage for other purposes.
What's interesting about
all this is that many cloud computing providers are not paying much attention
to the emerging SMB market. I
think many providers assume they will come to cloud anyway, and perhaps they
are right. However, you also have
to keep in mind that small businesses soon become big businesses. Many of those fast-growing businesses
will use cloud computing as a strategic differentiator that will allow them to
lead their markets, using cloud computing solutions that provide both lower
costs and agile computing benefits.
Thus, cloud computing could find that it grows more around the success
of the smaller players, than it does by waiting for the behemoths to begin
adopting cloud computing.
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