Startups can grow faster if their roots are in the cloud

As a CIO and an entrepreneur, workshop colleagues often ask me what they can put in the cloud. My answer ... "That's it." Point! And that’s it!

The cloud is a big equalizing factor for modern startups. This is one of the few areas where a startup can access the same resources as large corporations.
When you are thinking of starting your own business, there are many different factors and decisions that may seem overwhelming. But there are some basic principles that will help you get the most out of the cloud.

Step One: “Why Not?”

With all this cloudy “hype” - on billboards, in television commercials and in the news — it's easy to lose sight of the real benefits that the cloud can provide to business. To use cloud technology to the fullest, for a start it would be nice to know what they can do for you at all.

Flexibility

Before starting a business, it was necessary to anticipate the growth of the company, and investment needs were used as a statistical indicator of business conditions. Today, business owners can get, along with telephony and credit cards, cloud services that will fully meet their immediate needs, with flexible scaling for a growing business. The cloud elegantly supports periods of abundance and decline in seasonal and new products.

We hear a lot about the importance of expansion, but the underestimated benefit of the cloud is its ability to narrow the business. Small business requires agility and flexibility to test new products, test, research and expand. If the business doesn’t go, narrowing down is simpler by simply canceling the subscription. Cloud supports true Fail Fast an approach.

Security

There is a common misconception about the risk of storing data in the cloud, and if you want to preserve, for example, your intellectual property, you must store data under lock and key.

• Think of the cloud as a bank
  If you had a million dollars 70 years ago, you could have hidden it under a mattress, doubting the bank’s ability to protect your investment. Today, you go and put money directly into the bank, because they have made huge investments in security.
  
• Now think about the technical aspect of security.
  At the scale of companies such as Amazon and Google, resources stored in the cloud are much better protected than in any startup. Small companies can take months or even years to simply uncover a vulnerability, not to mention fixing it. Cloud solution providers provide secure work for all customers, regardless of company size, by proactively monitoring attacks and instantly fixing errors.

Step Two: The Beginning

There is a very small amount of what an entrepreneur is ready to buy starting a company. However, here are three key areas to focus on in order to provide a quick boost, and a more logical justification for the initial investment.

Operating activities

In fact, the company's operations are likely to be the first to find their place in the cloud. Plug-and-play solutions for accounting, payroll and management of productivity or personnel - these functions are some of the easiest to work in the cloud.

Applications

Hosting enterprise applications such as email and the CRM system in the cloud is another logical move. When enterprises begin to cut their own costs, it makes sense to immediately use easily accessible services such as Gmail or Salesforce . Cloud applications allow entrepreneurs not to tighten their belts too much when necessary.

Web site

The most widespread advice previously for entrepreneurs sounded like: “you need a good suit”, “you need a good pitch presentation” or “you need to get good business cards”. Now, the most common piece of advice says that “an entrepreneur needs a good professional website.”

There is not a single reason why your startup’s website should look and function worse than Fortune companies. Cloud-based resources such as Amazon Web Services allow entrepreneurs to create easily scalable websites, securely manage credit card information (well, almost), or control unexpected spikes in activity.

Clouds change the rules of the game. This is not a whim, and not just a buzzword. For any startup, the cloud provides resources that were once only available to large enterprises.

So take a close look at your startup’s business plan and analyze potential problems and obstacles. They can almost certainly be resolved by the cloud.

Article in topic: "Life in the clouds"