The cloud is quickly becoming the go-to location for small business operations. If you’re just getting started in business, you have a lot of essential systems to manage: customer service, accounting, information storage, communications systems, and more. Fortunately, you can find solutions for managing all these in the cloud. Using the cloud offers many benefits, from cost-effectiveness to enhanced functionality.
An estimated 78 percent of small businesses will have fully adopted cloud computing by 2020. Make sure you’re one of the smart companies by staying top of this trend. Not convinced? Consider the following benefits of cloud computing.
Limited Up-Front Costs.
The cloud enables you to accomplish more tasks than ever with a minimal up-front investment. Cloud products are a smart choice for startups because they offer the advanced functionality you need to build a company from the ground up without draining your limited budget.
Cloud systems’ IT architecture offers a dramatically improved method of housing IT resources that starkly contrasts with traditional on-site storage. What’s more, when you pay for cloud capabilities, you’re paying just a fraction of what you could expect to invest for an in-house solution. If you need access to the functionality of a major call center or an advanced customer relationship management system or simply need extensive storage space, you can access it all on a budget — in the cloud.
Affordable Growth on Demand.
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Cloud solutions are built for growth. Because IT infrastructure is housed off site, growth is a simple matter of upgrading your plan. You don’t have to worry about installing new equipment, finding more office space, or adding anything physical to your workplace.
This is ideal for small businesses, whose growth is often unpredictable. Cloud systems are easy to upgrade as well as to downgrade. You can move to a large-scale solution when you hit a growth spurt without dipping too far into your reserves, and you can downsize fairly quickly and efficiently to protect your finances if your business takes a sudden dip.
Manageable Labor Costs.
Cloud solutions take out of your hands a great deal of the labor involved in various areas of business. If you use a cloud-based call center, you don’t have to maintain on-site staffing for call management. IT management is handled by your cloud provider as well. This means you won’t need to keep a large tech support staff on hand to manage potential problems or troubleshoot downtime.
Cloud systems are renowned for their reliability, so you’re far less likely to have downtime with one of these solutions to begin with. If you do experience trouble, however, you can turn to the cloud provider’s customer help line and technical support staff to resolve your issue. This removes a great source of strain from your small business, placing the responsibility firmly in the hands of professionals who are well equipped to handle it.
Off-Site Infrastructure.
The very nature of the cloud takes infrastructure out of your office and puts it on the internet, offering several benefits by doing so. Most important is the cloud’s constant accessibility. Information that’s stored in the cloud is available anywhere you have internet access. Many solutions are customized for remote access, such as Sage One’s flexible online accounting, which takes business management to a new level. You can check your invoices while you’re in the client’s office or keep an eye on your bottom line while you’re in the middle of a flight.
Another benefit of the cloud’s off-site infrastructure is its ability to save space. If you’re running your small business out of a home office or in limited professional space, you won’t have room for extensive storage facilities. Moving to the cloud will give you unlimited storage, allowing you to gather far more information than you could otherwise, storing records for future analysis without worrying about how much space you’re taking up by doing so.
Cloud solutions allow you to enjoy more functionality than you can get with most in-office setups. You can build a powerful company on a startup’s limited budget when you turn to the cloud for some or all of your most important business needs.
