Cloud solutions deliver many benefits. For the small business the three main ones are Cashflow, Value and Flexibility.
Cashflow For most firms the biggest single benefit is on their ever tight resource - Cashflow...
Clouds typical billing incures little of no capital costs and the monthly user licences fee means these solutions have very little impact on the financial bottom line.
Pay as You Go (PAYG) is increasingly the business norm. So just as you rent your office space, vehicles and mobiles why not rent a Cloud Service? IT support can also be PAYG - Pay As You Go with one-off projects and ad-hoc consultancy. Both can help to reduce and even circumvent many of the issues associated with the lack of in-house IT support.
Value SaaS Suites are also good value - you get a great deal of software for s very low outlay.
For example, Microsoft’s SME offering, ‘Office 365 Business Standard’ costs only £9.40 per month (annual commitment) and includes not only the full desktop versions of all the major applications, but also Exchange email/diary OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams plus an increasing number of powerful supporting applications such as Tasks. Flow, Planner etc.
Flexibility Another major benefit is that licences can be added or removed ‘month by month’ as firms grow or projects start or finish.
Licencing itself is also flexible and can be closely targeted to each user role and demands. For example, outworkers that don’t need full software applications can be provided with a low-cost web licence – accessing apps running in the cloud or on their mobile. While demanding business analyst and managers can be licensed for powerful business intelligence forecasting tool and project applications.
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