Are Small Businesses adopting the Cloud?

According to the research from managed services provider Claranet, more medium-sized companies are using cloud services (60%) than smaller businesses (44%).

Part of this reason would be down to change, its hard as a small business to implement new technologies to early because as you don’t know if it will help with your business objectives, or when a newer and better technology will be out.

Take for instance Windows 8, when that came it is was the next best operating system to have and within a few months of release, it became apparent that maybe I should stick with windows 7 and wait until all the problems had been ironed out. That is exactly what I did, now I am a happy user of Windows 10.

Small business’s do not have much leg room to make mistakes, essentially limiting them to full implementation before really getting to test it. Also, the initial £20000 that had to be used to set up all their servers for I.T. infrastructure still have a business use, and in this regards change is expensive.

What about start-ups?

Depending on the entrepreneurs understanding of the cloud, I believe more start-ups will adopt the cloud. Companies like Microsoft have made it very simple for new business’ to use cloud-based tools such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM to provide admin functions for people in different divisions and accounting tools.

With only a monthly/yearly subscription to think about, it is much easier to adopt the cloud as a service.

Tanya Shirlow, Head of SMB at Microsoft, says there is still some scepticism among small companies about the cloud but believes this is starting to change.

“Businesses can be sceptical about new technologies that they do not understand well; many SMBs may associate new models of IT consumption as being the reserve of enterprises, as requiring an untenable level of in-house IT support or of being too ‘vanilla’ to apply to their organisation,” she said.

“Innovation can be seen as risky to implement as there is no definitive guide on how to do it properly. However, by making small changes to existing processes one step at a time, the benefits of cloud computing can lead to a path of innovation that will propel businesses forward,” she said.