Stop being an IT company; do what you’re good at

IT can be a significant expense for any business, but for small businesses in particular it can be a huge financial burden. With no in-house IT department, the day-to-day maintenance of IT infrastructure such as recovering lost data, managing software updates, and fixing broken PCs is often left to owners, directors and founders to manage. And as you can imagine, they don’t have the time for it! In fact, the director of a small business with 15 staff recently told me he’s spent 142 hours, or in monetary terms £15,000 of his time fixing in-house IT issues in the last year – needless to say, he wasn’t happy.

So what can small business owners do to reduce these crippling costs and spend more time on what they’re good at? The answer: the Cloud. With huge financial, time and space savings to be made, it’s a no brainer. So why are some businesses still reluctant to make the leap to and go cloud-based?

Some of the most common barriers to adoption of cloud technology include feeling that the cloud isn’t as secure as traditional IT infrastructure (according to the Cloud Adoption, Practices and Priorities Survey Report, data security was the biggest concern for 73 percent of survey respondents), that it’s unreliable, and, no doubt due to the name, that your data is just ‘floating’ about somewhere out of reach.

And as if that wasn’t enough, many business owners feel that they are being misled by providers who claim to offer a cloud service when, in reality, they offer hosted cloud. Hosted-cloud providers often attempt to present themselves as true-cloud providers when in fact, all they’re offering is to put the server that previously sat in your office in theirs - which is just as costly and inefficient.

So common misconceptions and hosted solutions aside, how does going cloud-based really benefit your small business?

It’s a time saver
True cloud providers will ensure that any maintenance or software updates are done for you: the service is so seamless you won’t even know when updates are happening. Moreover, any data that you store in the cloud is securely backed up so that, if a computer is lost, broken or damaged, you can instantly log in on another device and recover whatever it is that you were working on – handy!

It’s flexible
In recent years the ability to work from home has become something of a requirement for jobseekers; in fact, businesses must now extend the right to request flexible working to all employees.

The modern workforce doesn’t follow the 9-5 model; people want to work when they want (within reason), from wherever they want. They want to work on their phone, tablet or laptop whilst at home, in the office or on-the-go. Using true-cloud solutions gives your staff this flexibility. Whether you’re at 30,000 feet, on the train to a meeting or simply working from home, all you need is a login and an internet connection and you’re ready to go.

It’s scalable
Unlike hosted cloud services, with true-cloud there’s no need to purchase costly user licences to cover the managed service providers’ increased IT infrastructure costs. If new people join your team, cloud solutions scale up easily and are often available on a pay per user per month basis. All you need to do is add a new user, and that person is all set up and good to go!

It’s cheap, and makes financial forecasting easy
By migrating to the cloud, you don’t have to worry about purchasing and maintaining expensive IT infrastructure on-site, meaning you can free up valuable office space. Whilst this might not seem like much of a saving, when you consider the cost of an IT department in terms of infrastructure and hires, it’s huge. I recently met with a business owner who estimates that within six months of switching to our cloud desktop solution he saved £6,000 in IT expenditure and a further £30,000 from not having to purchase a server.

It’s safe as houses
As I’ve already mentioned, security is one of the biggest barriers to cloud adoption. But it really shouldn’t be.

One of the most common worries is that you’ll lose access to and control of your company data. But the reality is that the security checks now in place are incredibly robust: providers must be fully compliant and have all the necessary security accreditations in place. They are all fully audited by professional bodies to enable them to work with corporations and enterprises that require an extremely high level of sensitivity around data.

And those worried about staff leaving and still having access to company data on their own devices need not worry. These days, many true-cloud services, ours included, offer account holders admin rights that include the ability to choose who does and doesn’t have access to company data at the touch of a button. So when a member of staff moves on, you can revoke their access quickly and permanently.

And let’s not forget reliability, either. In 2014, with a capacity five times that of its competitors, Amazon Web Services delivered its customers a true-cloud service with a 99.9974% uptime – that’s a safe pair of hands right there.

With the cloud benefiting your company’s bottom-line and facilitating the flexibility that the modern workforce expects these days, it really is well positioned to help drive business growth. And while security worries do still exist, they are much more of a perception issue than anything else. The cloud is secure, it will keep your data safe, and it will help your company grow. So what’s holding you back now?