How the Cloud will help Business Growth
Growing a startup business can be a pain-in-the-ass. An often quoted statistic says, “50 percent of new businesses fail within their first 5 years.” This shows the surviving strength of some successful start-ups you see nowadays. For a business to survive, so many things have to be put in place. Perseverance is needed just as Steve Jobs said, “I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”
While it is something which most of us would agree to without argument, the world of business has moved ahead. Long gone are the days where you kept shooting (even if it was dark) and one day you’d hit the target. The speed and dynamism of modern businesses are such that you don’t really get many shots to fire. This is precisely the reason why so many startups succumb within the first few years of their birth. A great business idea is nothing if somebody else out there can execute it better than you. So, the question is – how do you get ahead of everybody else? Or in true management terms, how do gain that elusive competitive edge? The answer is hard but smart work. You need to stay up to date with the resources that can nurture your business, create synergies through collaborations with such resource providers and take leaps bigger than anybody else around you. One such resource is – CLOUD.
Apart from the few must-have ingredients such as; excellent products that people want, quality visibility study of the business, the appropriate effort and, business that are able to deliver, there are other few business tweaks that every startup should learn about, to promote their business to success with cloud computing.
How the Cloud will help change your Story
Cloud computing help startups grow easily giving them access to products and services that were previously accessible to only big business due to high cost and budgets. According to Brendan Wilde, a domain registration expert from Umbrellar, “domain names and cloud computing services are quite affordable these days. So, it’s unthinkable to fail because of the poor choice of web hosting” and well, be it any industry or domain of business, a web-based presence is a must-have. According to Euromonitor, a staggering 71 percent of modern trade is facilitated directly or indirectly through web-based platforms. Clearly, one might as well not have a business than one without an online presence.
Save Costs
We all know the ensuing aim of any business (in strictly monitory terms) is to maximize profit. While we focus on generating more revenue, we often forget that there is another key component to profit i.e. cost (thanks to the eternally divine profitability framework). Today, over 83 percent of outsourced consultation projects are focused on either sales transformation or cost reduction and, therefore, one of the key ways businesses can grow is to minimize cost and maximize profit without compromise on quality. Cloud providers are cost-effective, giving an opportunity to spend less on services. Whether it be paperless documentation, real-time inventory, or even a simple support capability based on cloud, cost reduction is significant.
Support & Reliability
We live in a world where the aftersales, support and service functions are pivotal to success. Of the thousands of KPIs (metaphorically of course!) that companies define for measuring success, customer satisfaction remains the most invaluable and a good cloud service provider offers a user-friendly interface and reliable infrastructure giving startups top-notch systems that could have taken them years to develop and implement. This makes the journey of business development easy and faster. You wouldn’t want to risk your first mover advantage with your idea being in the pipeline just because of some implementation barriers now, would you?
Run your business on-the-go
One of my personal favorite reasons for the entire motivation of putting pen to paper is running a business on-the-go. With cloud computing, you no longer need to stick to your office desk as cloud platforms keep you mobile so you have access to your business 24/7. Even when on holiday, the cloud makes it possible to attend to your customers’ needs & fine tune your products.
It enhances Collaboration
Work sphere today is all about teamwork, and the cloud facilitates easy collaboration. For example, think of something such as shared calendars, so simple yet so critical to the facilitation of scheduling meetings. Well, I know what you’re going to say, Whoopity Doo! A lot of applications and email providers do that, but it is the security and the single end-to-end solution that matters. Shared document editors allow you to systematically process and collect data, while multi-user video conferencing tool helps meeting purposes, work goes seamlessly. Most of these services are cheap and sometimes free working across OS platforms such as; iOS, Windows, & Android. Business success is easily achieved when collaboration goes easy.
Your files are up-to-date
If your business involves heavy logistics and warehousing, which most of the retail business models do, the benefit of paperless documentation over cloud can alone give you enough bang for your buck! Apart from this added benefit, is that cloud storage and sharing applications sync your documents automatically whenever you make a change. This ensures your work is always up-to-date and that the information sharing process stays fresh for all stakeholders. Say goodbye to the complications of information mismatch and misunderstanding due to obsolete or outdated data.
The Cloud effectively safeguards your company and client data
One of the keys to driving business growth is keeping it secure. As said before, there is no use of a great business idea if somebody else gets to know it and executes it better. Needless to say, security in today’s age of cyber terrorism is of indispensable value. A recent Nielson report yielded a mind-boggling statistic. Close to 77 percent of the companies that use cloud computing have never been struck by a cyber threat. Why would one ever want to be in the other 23 percent? Storing data on your own server is not as safe as keeping them in the cloud. Security is a value added service offer by cloud service providers, your data would not leak to a third party. A good cloud storage company has effective secure measures against hacking, data loss etc. Your business grows all the way.
Conclusion
Clearly, cloud computing is a resource that can make or break businesses. Such is the magnitude of impact that a simple decision of subscription to the cloud can add value to various fronts of the bottom-line of the company. Yes! It is true that subscribing to a cloud service can effectively contribute to your business growth by making all growth infrastructures available to you at a more affordable and conveniently rate.
