Startups can grow faster if their roots are in the cloud

As a CIO and an entrepreneur, my colleagues often ask me what they can put in the cloud. My answer is ... "Everything." 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, television advertising and news - it's easy to lose sight of the real benefits that the cloud can provide to a business. To use cloud technology to its fullest, it would be a good start to know what they can do for you at all.

Flexibility

Previously, starting a business, it was required to anticipate the growth of the company, and investment needs were used as a statistical indicator of the business environment. 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 of seasonal and new products.
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We hear a lot about the importance of expansion, but the undervalued use of the cloud is its ability to narrow down a business. Small businesses require agility and flexibility to test new products, test, research, and expand. If the business does not go, the reduction of the activity is easier, by simply canceling the subscription. The cloud supports the true “Fail Fast” approach.

Security

There is a common misconception about the riskiness of storing data in the cloud, and if you want to preserve, for example, your intellectual property, you must keep your data locked up.

• Think of a cloud as a bank
  If 70 years ago you had a million dollars, you could hide 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 a huge investment in security.
  
• Now think about the technical aspect of security.
  On a scale of companies like Amazon and Google, resources stored in the cloud are much better protected than in any startup. Small companies can spend several months or even years just to uncover a vulnerability, not to mention fixing it. Cloud solution providers ensure safe operation for all customers, regardless of company size, through proactive attack monitoring and instant error correction.

Step Two: Start

There is a very small amount of what an entrepreneur is willing to buy when starting a company. Nonetheless, here are three key areas that need to be focused on to provide quick momentum, and a more logical justification for initial investment.

Operating activities

In fact, the company's operating activities are likely to be the first to find their place in the cloud. Plug-and-play solutions for accounting, payroll, and performance or personnel management — these are some of the easiest to use in the cloud.

Applications

Placing corporate applications in the cloud, such as e-mail and a CRM system, is another logical move. When businesses begin to reduce 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 earlier advice 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 advice is that “an entrepreneur badly needs a good professional website.”

There is no reason why your startup website should look and work worse than that of a Fortune company. Cloud resources like Amazon Web Services allow entrepreneurs to create easily scalable websites, securely manage credit card information (well, almost) or monitor unexpected spikes in activity.

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

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

The article in the topic: "Life in the clouds"