Starting up a company can be overwhelming especially when it comes to making key decisions regarding IT, Infrastructure, data management and employees with skills to manage these processes. One start-up client asked me what the “cloud” will provide him that his own infrastructure doesn’t and if it’s worth investing in or just another tulip craze. My response to him was “low costs, infinite scalability and out of box packaging will enable you to focus on converting leads to clients as opposed to syncing contacts with your phone and emailing pitchbooks to yourself”.
The bottom line for any business is profits achieved through productivity because you can never ‘buy’ back lost time. Especially for young startups, there seems to be a sea of questions and answers on how to grow a business and what needs to be done, which is often overwhelming rather than useful. Leveraging the pay as you go cost structure of existing cloud technologies such as Salesforce, Google Apps and Dropbox, you can reduce fixed costs and grow your business with a variable cost structure. This will reduce your burn rate, save you time and allow you to focus on investing in revenue generating projects and employees.
Cloud computing is not only limited to start-ups. With tightening budgets and the explosive growth in terms of virtual offerings and service providers, companies in “post-recession” mode can significanlty lean out their operations by outsourcing these services and other non essential tasks.
Here are a few questions to ask when deciding if leveraging the cloud can benefit your business:
– What privacy rights do you have on your data and what security measures are in place?
– Where is the data stored, who are the users of the data and how would it effect you if the data was lost?
– How many users of your data are employees vs. customers?
– What is your current ‘per user (employee / customer)’ cost of running your business and how is it broken down in terms of fixed / variable?
– By leaning out your costs, what kind of pricing improvements can you offer to your clients and would this make your more competative in the market place?
