Cloud-Enabling Startups and Small Businesses
Small businesses continue to play a vital role in the US economy both in terms of the overall GDP and employment generation. Startups and small businesses can leverage cloud offerings to achieve operational efficiencies in both core and non-core areas. Cloud migration or being cloud-native would be a key consideration for the growth strategy of these businesses irrespective of the industry and domain they operate in. This series of articles takes a look at how the small businesses can leverage the cloud offerings at each of the levels starting from the basic Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Business Process as a Service (BPaaS).
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Any business, even when it is not e-commerce focused, requires an IT infrastructure strategy to achieve efficiencies in operations. Whether it be file sharing between employees or publishing material for external consumption, the business needs to maintain a basic server. The server can be on-premise or in the cloud. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) enables the business to set up the basic server infrastructure in the cloud. IaaS enables basic storage, compute, networking capabilities, the creation of virtual machines and auto-scaling capabilities.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Setting up a basic server is the first step. The next step is to set up the operating system and the basic software suite to convert the servers into a “Platform” for the business to operate on including running existing applications, building and deploying custom software. Platform as a Service(PaaS), typically offered by the same providers as IaaS offers a variety of platforms to choose from including opensource. Examples of PaaS are Microsoft Azure, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Google App Engine, Redhat OpenShift.
With an IT strategy to start out with on-premise servers, a typical small business could start out with an off the shelf server. Investment in hardware is not much, reliable servers are available for less than $1K. But then comes the part of setting up and maintaining the servers. Maintaining even a single server on-premise requires to have at least one resource working parttime bring up the server and firewall, installing the required software, adding and updating user accounts, scheduling backups and attending to occasional upgrades and monitoring. For a startup with less than 5 employees, this could mean that 1 person is focused on the IT infrastructure. That could be as high as 20% of the resources, significant for a company in the growth stage.
This is where IaaS and PaaS can bring efficiencies. A basic subscription of a cloud instance would cost less than $50 a month and with the promotional offers available from the providers, the services could be free of cost at least for the first year. For example, Microsoft Azure offers 750 hours per month of compute server for free for the first 12 months. Amazon AWS offers $1,000 — $15,000 promotional credit for startups for up to 2 years. Google GCP also offers the first 12 months free.
For a startup in this era, it is definitely worth starting out as cloud-native leveraging the cost saving from promotional offers so that it can direct all resources towards proving the business model in the initial years. For established small businesses, trying out the cloud services in parallel along with a cost-benefit analysis is recommended before homing in on a cloud migration strategy.
