These days we revel in the fact that we can push a button and stuff comes to us. Cars, Lyft, Meals, Movers, etc. We reliably get X and company Y does all the heavy lifting for us. Of course we pay a premium for this, but the saved costs in time and/or stress of managing and maintaining the process ourselves make it worth it.
This full-stack “X-as-a-service” idea is nothing new. When a firm is able to specialize in delivering a very specific service and grow to a certain size, it can achieve economies of scale and pass on its efficiencies in the form of lower costs, better performance, and higher reliability than customers could achieve themselves. The most game-changing companies in this vein of the past decade have been cloud providers: companies, like Amazon and Google, that can provide all your infrastructure needs with the push of a button.
New ventures in general suffer from a lack of infrastructure, manpower and funding…and all these three concerns are categorically addressed by the cloud. Moving to the cloud minimizes the need of huge capital investments to set up expensive infrastructure. For nascent entrepreneurs, physical hardware and server costs used to be formidable given the limited budgets at their disposal. Seed money was also required to hire office space, promote the business and hire workers. Today, thanks to cloud technology, getting a new business off the ground and running costs virtually nothing. Most of the resources and tools that new ventures need are available on the cloud at minimal costs, in fact quite often at zero costs, making this a powerful value proposition for small businesses. A cloud hosting provider such as AWS can enable you to go live immediately, and will even scale up to your requirement once your business expands.
Start ups have always been more agile than their large scale counterparts, and the cloud helps them take this a step further. Resources can be scaled up or down in no time, whereas in traditional environments it would have taken many days, considerable planning and funds to add hardware and software. Cloud computing also helps improve collaboration across teams, often across geographies. Data sharing is instantaneous, and teams can work on a task together in real time regardless of their location.
Powered by the cloud, small businesses operate with shoestring budgets and key players in different continents. All their accounting, client data, marketing and other business critical files can be stored online and are accessible from anywhere. These online tools can be accessed and utilised instantly, and underpin all the crucial processes on which these businesses thrive. Strategic financial decisions are made after garnering insights from cloud-based accounting software. E-invoicing helps settle bills in a fraction of the time of traditional billing systems, and client queries are answered quickly through cloud-based management systems—saving precious time and increasing customer satisfaction levels to an all-time high. Whether at home, on vacation or on the phone, businesses can oversee sales, replenish products and plan new sales strategies. That’s a whole new way of doing business, and seems to be very successful!
Reasons why Startups Must Consider Shifting to Cloud?
Minimal Investment
One of the biggest problems in a startup is the lack of money. You have limited capital resources and you need to invest it wisely. What do you think would be a better investment? Investing in human resources like developers, HR, marketing etc or investing in core hardware. Both are equally important – without competent hardware how are you going to use your developer’s potential and without developers what are you going to with your hardware. Cloud computing makes this choice easy. You only need to invest in capable human resources and hardware is taken care off by the cloud. You get a scalable platform which you can use as per your need.
