Starting a business involves a lot of investment, if your mission is to deliver a great customer experience. Obviously it is vital to keep costs as low as possible when starting out, but to retain as much flexibility as possible, otherwise growth may be halted because your business simply cannot afford to add capacity when needed. Here’s how building your new business on Cloud technologies can keep your capital spend low and your business agile.
How Cloud technologies can help
Cloud technologies are an ideal starting point for ambitious small businesses with real growth plans. Rather than buying a company server to host corporate data and email, get the benefits of using Cloud-hosted alternatives:
Cloud-based file storage
Storage options such as CloudDrive provide scalable, secure file storage, allowing access important data from out of the office. Choosing hosted file storage allows you to save on costly hardware, the ongoing costs of supporting and maintaining the system and greatly simplifies the process of building a mobile workforce.
This also allows you to reduce your capital spend: the subscription model of Cloud services can be written off as an operational expenditure, helping to keep your accountant happy.
Hosted email services
The same benefits are also available when moving to a hosted email service. As well as reducing costs, hosted email services greatly simplify the task of managing licenses. Instead of buying licenses in perpetuity, you can simply increase or decrease subscriptions on an individual level, ensuring you only ever pay for what you use.
The responsibility for maintaining and supporting the email infrastructure also falls to the service provider. As well as providing an email service, your online provider also ensures that the hardware and software is kept up-to-date, your data is kept safe from hackers and cybercriminals, and a basic content scanning service is in place to block spam and malware that could damage your network.
Using the Cloud for website functions
A functioning website is a vital part of your business marketing efforts, and it’s essential that the infrastructure supporting it is resilient and reliable. Few businesses realise that using a website hosting service is yet another example of a Cloud service. And when you are planning and deploying your site, make sure you adopt a mobile-first strategy.
Choosing to build a new company using anything but Cloud services is a big risk in an era when flexibility and responsiveness are essential. Why risk unnecessary capital spend when strong Cloud-based alternatives exist? Especially when those services will support much more agile business growth than their on-site counterparts.
If you are thinking about starting a business and want to know more about how Cloud technologies will help you hit the ground running, please get in touch.
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