New developments in Cloud computing for SMEs

Cloud computing is a major advancement in the history of computing. It enables the organisations to deploy, operate and consume technology with greater agility and at a low cost. SMEs are known as the key drivers of a nation’s economy and technologies like cloud computing provide them access to applications and services that is otherwise out of their reach due to high solution costs. Cloud is flexible and the pay-as-you-go cost model is scalable, affordable, and customisable. With the Indian Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) providing substantial subsidies for cloud computing to SMEs, vendors can better position their services to small businesses and enable them to embrace cloud for the overall development of the country.

Increase in cloud adoption

The hardware and software infrastructure for private, public or hybrid clouds, depending on business requirement is already available. Services like Software as a service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), or platform as a service (PaaS) are being used by enterprises world over to enhance operational quality. In 2016, the adoption of cloud computing will drift down from the large corporate segment into small businesses, making operations more efficient and reducing capital spending. Still, a huge number of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are reluctant to involve cloud computing in their businesses. The implementation of cloud technologies by the Indian SMEs can greatly benefit them in terms of cost effectiveness and scalability.

Recently, Surat Diamond Association (SDA) and Microsoft partnered to enable 20,000 Small and Medium Enterprises (SMBs) in Gujarat with cloud technology. With support from Microhard IT Solutions, one of Microsoft’s leading partners, SMBs can adopt modern technologies easily to expand the reach of their business and make it more profitable and productive.

Manohar Hotchandani, Director – Business Development, Microsoft India said, “Technology provides significant opportunities for SMBs to achieve their business goals and make use of self-provisioned cloud solutions to meet their IT needs. This further fuels our vision of enabling the mobile-first, cloud-first world with the most modern solutions and helping SMBs across the country to grow with technology and accelerate their business.”

The three top development trends in cloud computing to watch out for in 2016 are:

• Greater adoption of hybrid cloud computing across enterprises
• Rapid containerisation for efficient resource utilisation
• Enhanced support for continuous delivery

Why SMEs should be adopting cloud computing

Cloud computing can provide cost-cutting solutions to the SMEs. It also has the potential to decrease their hardware expenses. Cloud-based continuous delivery of new enhancements by vendors along with subscription-based pricing makes it easy for SMEs to decrease their budget. The most compelling benefits of public cloud computing for a SME are:

• No initial hardware investments
• Pay-as-you-go model
• Quick time to value

CloudGarage is one such platform which caters to the specific business requirements of each organisation. Their usage model is based on Pay-As-You-Go and enterprise data can be accessed and managed from anywhere around the globe. They also allow an enterprise to choose their specification as per their requirements with multiple layers of security to ensure safety and integrity of data, application and IP.

Ricoh India recently unveiled a new cloud strategy for small and medium businesses.

This integrated Cloud Environment (ICE) is a single interface connecting Ricoh MFP’s to cloud services. It enables companies to use the internet as their IT infrastructure, directly scanning paper documents to cloud storage services and automatically turning them into fully editable documents along the way.

Hybrid cloud: Security with flexibility

In the hybrid cloud domain, the solutions provide the flexibility and affordability of the public cloud with the security of a private cloud. This combo of public and private model really packs a punch thereby making it particularly appealing to SMEs.

A hybrid strategy is also more flexible and allows an enterprise to achieve greater server usage at affordable costs with all the sensitive data stored on private servers.

Effective Disaster Recovery

An organisation needs to design its own disaster recovery strategies but once it is collaborated with the cloud, data security is the responsibility of cloud. The disaster recovery services provided by the cloud are comparatively more secure and automated.

Fully automated services

Automated services provided by cloud helps the SMEs to shift their focus on other core issues as all the responsibility of software upgradation and server update is on the service provider.

Cloud and security

When it comes to data breach then small businesses are usually at a higher risk than large corporations, and less likely to recover from it. Data security is going to be a huge focus for small businesses in 2016 with cloud technology being the norm.

Technology to power small businesses

IT vendors have developed custom software applications for businesses of all size which means that enterprise technology is no longer limited to large corporations. With access to such tools SMEs can stay competitive and thrive.

Microsoft has already announced the availability of Microsoft Azure services via local datacenter regions in India. Its open and flexible nature allows customers to host a range of operating systems, use any data base or development platform and deliver services to end users using any PC or any mobile device. Azure also provides first-class support for Java, Node.js, Python, Ruby, and PHP, and Microsoft Azure is certified to host SAP environments.