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What Cloud Computing Means for Small Businesses

By Heather Robinette

Many of the companies we work with on a day to day basis are small to medium sized business (SMBs) and before the cloud era, they sometimes struggled to compete with larger competitors. With the increasing rate of cloud adoption, this is all beginning to change. According to a report by Emergent Research and Intuit, “By 2020, 78% of small businesses will be fully adapted to the cloud, up from 37% in 2014.”

So what does the cloud mean for small businesses?

Increase in Small Businesses
First and foremost, the cloud means an increase in small businesses. The cloud now offers an opportunity to anyone to start a business. The cloud is not only changing how small businesses operate, but they are changing the economic landscape that we know today. The question is, what will it look like in the next 5 years? Next 10 years?

Lower Barrier to Entry
Next we want to touch one of Porter’s Five Forces, the threat of new entry. In this case, the cloud has drastically lowered the barrier to entry meaning the threat of new competitors is ever increasing. With that in mind, small businesses now have a much better chance to compete with the larger companies because they are able to focus their spend on other areas of their business since a large capital expense is no longer required to create their IT infrastructure.

Head to Head Competition
Continuing on from the previous point, this means small businesses can now go head to head with large companies. By not only adopting the public cloud, but by using the growing market of plug and play services, companies of any size can now compete in the same arena and on a more level playing field. Something to keep in mind as your company conducts a competitive analysis in the future. 

With all that said, what we really expect to see is an increase in disruption across many industries as smaller business are now able to compete with larger companies. Additionally, we see this forcing both small and large businesses to really focus on their competitive advantage. This is when we’ll really start to see companies stand out and hopefully start to positively impact their industry. So we hope you’ll take this opportunity to start to consider your value proposition and what makes you stand out from your competitors. Getting a head start will only help you in the long run. Until then, we’ll wait and see….

 

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Tags: Move to the Cloud

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