If you’re a small-business owner considering a move to the cloud, you’re not alone: As noted by a recent Venture Beat article, 61 percent of SMBs with less than 100 employees and 68 
percent of those with fewer than 20 employees have already adopted the cloud. And when it comes to heavy use of cloud infrastructure, SMBs are ahead of enterprises by eight percent. This is no surprise, since outsourcing specific infrastructure tasks can significantly reduce the strain placed on local IT pros. But making the most of cloud IT infrastructure means spending in the right place at the right time — here’s what you need to know about tapping this fundamental cloud service.
Price isn’t everything
But it still counts. According to a Jan. 14th article from Cloud Tech, large infrastructure providers offer significant value over the long term — including benefits such as 100-percent SLAs, large-volume block storage and a wide range of payment options. Price remains a critical factor for small businesses, however, especially with upfront costs and low payments for server access. Bottom line? For SMBs price will always be a top priority, but it’s important to look beyond IaaS pricing wars to what’s under the hood: The ideal provider offers a mix of low-cost performance and long-term reliability.
Spending habits are changing
RCP Magazine, meanwhile, points out that while the cloud now accounts for one-third of all infrastructure spending — for a total of $3.25 billion in the third quarter of 2014 — much of this spending is concentrated in data centers. In other words, small businesses and enterprises are losing interest in home-grown clouds, opting instead for the benefits of carrier-neutral or collocated data centers for their infrastructure needs. There’s a simple takeaway here: IaaS spending habits are changing, and small businesses can come out ahead with the right investment.
The market is widening
Business Standard lays out several reasons for SMBs to consider adoption cloud infrastructure. One of the most important? Choice. While there’s a great deal of talk about provider consolidation over the next year as prices begin to flatten out, what this argument often ignores is the rise of niche IaaS providers which specifically target the needs of small and midsize businesses. Yes, the cheapest infrastructure will still come from an Amazon, Google or other large providers but specialized providers will also start to gain ground.
Data is everywhere
Small businesses must also be prepared for new challenges in IaaS, most notably data protection and compliance. To increase security and IT peace of mind, it’s important to understand what falls under your purview in an SLA, who owns stored data and ensure that authentication becomes a baked-in part of any access request. The result is an information protection policy that carries across servers, providers and networks — giving you flexibility without compromising consumer data.
Efficiency is the new agility
Agility has always been a touchpoint for the cloud: Small businesses get big benefits from technology that lets you move data at will, across platforms and allows apps of any kind to play nicely. But this seamless interaction is now an assumption rather than a selling point for IaaS solutions — providers must be willing to cooperate or fall by the wayside. According to Forbes, efficiency will become a critical metric in 2015 as small businesses look for ways to maximize resource use while limiting price. This means a hard look at provisioning, units of scale and virtual machine (VM) use to determine where efficiency gains can be made. In effect, cloud infrastructure has leveled the playing field: SMBs must now think like enterprises.
Small businesses are investing in IaaS — understanding the market before you spend means better performance for the price.
David Eisner is the President and CEO of Dataprise. Eisner founded Dataprise back in 1995 and led it to become one of the nations leading providers of IT and cloud computing services for small and medium-sized businesses.
