Cloud Computing: Small and Medium Size Business Storage Moves to the Cloud

The debate rages as to which group cloud computing benefits most, large enterprises or small and medium sized companies.   It turns out that both groups stand to benefit.

A survey by CA Associates found that 92 percent of large corporations had deployed at least one application via the cloud, and 53 percent have more than six cloud-based services.  Often large companies are ahead of the curve in hearing about and testing new technologies.  While smaller organizations can typically be more risk-adverse than larger companies; large companies often have more budget and resources to experiment with new technologies.  Virtualization technology, for example, is one technology that many large IT organizations have already tried out and have become comfortable with.  The CA Associate report found that familiarity and comfort with virtualized machines is often the first step in developing a mindset that is receptive to cloud computing.   Benefits of cloud computing that large organizations find attractive are cost savings, better cost control and operational efficiency.  And additional benefit are reduced on-site labor costs for for hardware support as well as less of a need for on-site help-desk application support.

Small and medium-sized organizations can derive many of the same benefits from the cloud as large ones, particularly costs savings and operational efficiency.  Sometimes there are not-so-obvious benefits too.  An additional advantage, for example, like disaster recovery capability, which is often a weak or even non-existent capability in smaller organizations, comes along for free because of the nature of  cloud computing.  The lower cost of applications available via the cloud mean that small companies can deploy applications that had previously been cost prohibitive for their organizations to consider.

At this point, rather than following the trend set by larger organizations, small and medium sized companies are actually leading larger companies in the adoption of the cloud.  What smaller organization have going for them is that they are much nimbler and more capable of making sweeping changes quickly.

InformationWeek quotes Analysys Mason analyst Steve Hilton as saying  “The global economy is turned around, so in the developed markets of the world, small businesses are starting to see their businesses grow again.”   And that translates into greater interest by SMBs in finding ways for technology investments to help them grow their businesses.

A survey by Egnyte, cloud-based storage company, found that three-quarters of small and medium sized businesses plan to increase their spending on cloud-based computing in 2011.  51 percent of SMBs specifically plan to increase their spend on collaboration software, a sweet spot for cloud applications, during 2011.

The Egnyte survey also looked at what SMBs thought about cloud-based storage.  As many as 91 percent of SMBs say that they are interested in adopting some sort of cloud-based storage to help them manage their growing need to store document and data.  Many small organizations are considering hybrid file systems, file systems where more infrequently used data resides on the cloud and more active data is cached locally.