5 ways the cloud and the green agenda help build SMB businesses

The digital era provides infinite opportunities to SMBs. From cost savings compared to on-premise infrastructure, lower utility costs and reduced administrative burden through to productivity tools to enable users to work from anywhere, the cloud has transformative potential for every British firm.

Its potential is so strong that a failure to embrace the cloud means that competitors are likely to steal a march on your business and be able to offer a more agile service, better customer experience and lower prices.

But how do cloud migrations support the green agenda and enable new ways of working for SMBs looking to gain a competitive advantage?

Time-savings and cost efficiency

The days of the old fashioned “IT cupboard” or server room are long gone for many SMBs. Avoiding buying and running in-house infrastructure saves valuable office space, as well as the cost of procurement, management and refreshing of legacy equipment.

On top of that, your users also benefit from almost constant uptime, access to data, key applications and productivity tools they need to do their job. With a solid cloud-based infrastructure, reliance on one device, clunky VPNs or bottlenecked support desks are a thing of the past.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) allows SMBs to buy the IT they need. Instead of paying to run over-provisioned servers with redundant capacity, services can be deployed based on usage. In peak periods resources can be scaled up - for instance ecommerce retailers can take on additional storage or network capacity in the build-up to Christmas. Equally, during quieter periods the resource can simply be scaled down with no need for downsizing or redundancies in the IT team.

Energy consumption is another important factor when evaluating a move to the cloud, not to mention boosting a firm’s green credentials. For analysts such as Pike Research, “energy use is certainly an important consideration in the data centre, and cloud solutions are more efficient than traditional systems.

Improve your end product

Creating a compelling customer experience has become something of a cliché, but it is all the more vital to compete. Modern consumers, whether B2B or B2C, expect an omnichannel experience with several ways to interact with their suppliers.

With cloud-based infrastructure, you can dramatically improve service levels for users to deliver this experience to your customers. With no wait times for hardware, on-site support or reliance on in-house systems, your core business systems are more resilient to failures or changing consumer demands.

Increased security and reliability

Cyber attacks show no sign of abating, with the NCSC reporting increases in both the volume and sophistication of attacks.

Another advantage of managed infrastructure over in-house is that you have the safety net of leading edge cyber security measures to protect yours, and your end users’ data. Given the damage that breaches do to businesses in terms of continuity, reputation and financial damage, running legacy hardware with patch vulnerability is simply not worth the risk.

With IaaS, you can also consolidate disaster recovery provisions in order to reduce costs and increase manageability. As a result, your business will benefit from higher levels of uptime, a seamless experience for your customers, and greater overall confidence in your organisation.

Fuelling further growth

Utilising managed infrastructure also provides the bedrock for your organisation to expand and differentiate itself. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, this is more than a nice-to-have – it is increasingly vital.

With in-built scalability and pre-integrated options, IaaS platforms leverage Azure, AWS and other public cloud providers. It also has the ability to integrate customers’ own private cloud infrastructure.

By leaning on cloud-based resources, IT departments can channel time and resources into growth-enabling projects instead of the traditional “keeping the lights on”. As a result, new infrastructure can easily be spun up to support new regions, business units or growth opportunities identified by market shifts.

IaaS in summary

In short, deploying an Infrastructure as a Service model for your business enables you to differentiate your offerings from your competitors, efficiently expand into new markets, reduce costs and resource demands, and provide a more robust, resilient business infrastructure.

In short, moving to the cloud makes perfect sense for many reasons.