The benefits and Pitfall of moving resources and infrastructure to the cloud, and the impact of service outages for the small business owner is a topic that is sometimes avoided by promoters of cloud services.
The buzz right now is cloud services and a cursory read of the high-octane promotions paints a very rosy picture of the benefits of putting your data “in the cloud” where the vendor promises a 5 nine uptime and so on and so forth. But is could services a good fit for the small business owner?
From all current data, about 62 percent of all cloud services problems are traceable to network connectivity issues. As great as the technology market is in the U.S., there is a large swath of this country that still relies on dial-up connection, some elements of broadband like DSL or RoadRunner and sometimes very unreliable pseudo-T1s for conducting business and in cloud services, connectivity is key.
For example, the Amazon S3 offering sounds great, but how long will it take to transfer 100GB of data over a dial-up connection? The mass marketing and hype over cloud services can be a dangerous undertaking for the small business owner who does not understand the risks involved.
Small and medium-sized businesses or SMBs, and startups appear to be the target of providers of cloud services and this to me is the wrong market segment to be targeting because they are vulnerable to anything that sounds affordable and is geared toward “saving you money”.
Small business owners do not have the personnel or skill set to ask tough questions like larger corporations would. They may not have the time it takes to engage in needs analysis and risk assessment. For example, when discussing virtualization and the Amazon S3 with a small business owner , they may get excited and say “let’s do it”. But when asked if they had any concerns and the answer is usually “no”.
A small business environment with a technology advisor would always ask questions involving the security, availability, and integrity of data; possibility access to data by third parties, business viability of the service provider etc.
If you are plannig on moving your business infrastructure to the cloud, it may be a good idea to seek the assistance of a professional.
True, but the problem is, many of us who are in a position to help educate small business owners with their IT decision making are ourselves dependent on the services of others and to be brutally honest, a lot of us do not understand what we are selling or trying to push to these potential customers. I have had a few people refuse to call me back because I insisted on doing a business and technology assessment – it is too much work! So how do you break down the technical jargon to a so-called layman’s language. The small business owner wants you, the expert, to come in and set things up. The next time they see you, they want to hear “it’s ready to go!”. The challenge for us then, is to come up with a simple format for educating our small business customers about the benefits of cloud computing. For example, when I told that customer of mine about Amazon S3, I immediately saw a disconnect, but when I mentioned online backup so you do not have to be rotating USB drives, it made more sense. Let us not forget that afterall, the word cloud refers to the internet. And the services provided covers most aspects of business from sales management to database hosting.
Daniel, I also think small consulting shops, who already help small businesses with their IT stuff, will play an important role in educating them on cloud computing.
That looks like a great offering Andy, especially now that we are learning that some broadband service providers are seriously considering placing a cap on how much bandwidth is used per month even for home users. And as it turns out, many small businesses are still home-based. My main point was that small business owners should take the time to understand what the whole concept of cloud computing is and see where it may be beneficial. Thanks for the information.
One of the things that should help in adoption of Cloud Computing for small business is the right tools such as our CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3 http://cloudberrylab.com. To cope with slow internet connection issues for instance we will be offering compression and chunking. In other words we will break down large files into smaller parts(chunks) and upload them to S3. the chunk that failed to upload will be retried. There is a lot of opportunities for small consulting business to help other companies when it comes to Cloud