Benefit of cloud computing for Small and Medium Business

Since few days I was willing to writing about cloud computing benefits for small and medium business but was not getting enough time for that or we can say I was afraid for writing same because of my limited amount of knowledge than also I forced myself to write and now I am starting.

In cloud computing one can have different prospective and different aspects but for enterprise the area that is going to cover maximum area is servers. Cloud computing not only can decrease the cost but can assure for data backup and maximum uptime guarantee of server with an SLA that is near to 100%.

For proving my point let me put an example of an email server. In present scenario using simple POP3 and SMTP mail in an enterprise is not enough and business must need to have an email solution that can give calendar sharing, calendars, resources sharing mechanism, automatically updated global address list for every new user and lot more.

One can have these solutions using MS Exchange or Zimbra or any similar other available tool. For these tools enterprise need to make a server at their premises and then they need to use this server as their primary mail server. If you see only this part of the above solution than this look very simple and cost effective but things that need to be taken care after creating this server can be as mentioned

1) Sever need to be up and running all the time.

2) Get UPS backup for same for a longer time.

3) Someone must need to take backup of server as its critical server and data is highly important

4) If server fails due to any hardware/software/power issue that you must need to have a redundant server.

5) This redundant server must need to be there in another part of globe because if any internet disturbance in your nation or zone and if your both server are in same zone than your mail server is practically down as no one from other side can send or receive mail to you.

6) These servers must need to secure with lot of work and manpower so that is going to be an extra cost.

7) You need to purchase the hardware and software so that will also make a cost to you.

8) You must need to upgrade hardware software and power backup solution in every 3 years. As per Intel you should not use hardware for more than three years.

If we take an example for creating an Exchange server in India for an organization of 100 to 250 people than minimum cost with no redundant server will be at least 10Lac INR per year at the same time if that organization goes for Microsoft Exchange online than for per mailbox it will cost 60$ so for 200 user it will cost 5.5Lac INR only. If you go for Google Apps or hosted zimbra than it could have gone more lower.

In cloud based mail server you don’t have to worry about any outage or data backup or security threat for your server or power failure or many other points that you can have in a server created or owned by an organization.

In cloud based server they will have backup, redundant server and everything else that one organization need. It will be cost effective and much more reliable too.

I cannot give same statement for bigger organization that has office around the world and big number of people because they must need to have their own data centers and they can manage and maintain it with no extra cost. But again that will be similar to cloud computing.

One can write n number of pages on benefit of cloud computing but from my side for today this is enough

Hope it was interesting and useful for you

Thanks

AP