Business growth without the pain

Taking your business to the next level through expansion is a gamble. You hope that the untapped customer demand creates revenue faster than your suppliers want paying for helping you build the infrastructure. If the demand is there, then you keep ahead in the cash-flow stakes. But if the growth fails to arrive on time, a lack of working capital can take a business down.

So it’s no surprise that once a company reaches some sort of equilibrium, where income exceeds outgoings, it’s very tempting to maintain the status quo. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

In the cloud

What if you didn’t have to invest in new equipment before you started to grow? What if you could get all the advantages of a new state-of-the-art infrastructure, but only pay as you grow. And if you didn’t grow, or if the market wasn’t there, then you could cut back and try something else, with no loss?

Well it’s now possible to do this with IT. With a cloud infrastructure, someone has taken the risk away. The infrastructure has been built, and all you need to decide is how much of it to use. If you need to grow quickly, then the resource is there, and if you then need to throttle-back, you can do it without any cost implications.

The real advantage of cloud services for a growth business is that it can be turned off and on when required. Building and provisioning servers can take businesses weeks to complete, especially if the IT department is stretched.

However, with a cloud infrastructure you can have one server, or multiple servers up and running in seconds. What’s more, you don’t need to spend time worrying if the server will be able to cope with the demand. If it doesn’t then you don’t have to wait around while it’s upgraded, because you can simply swap to a more highly specified server, or add more servers to cope with the additional load.

“A good cloud service is delivered via a self-service provisioning portal where you can create your own virtual servers within the capacity reserved and administer user access,” explains Steven Shepherd of IBM Business Partner Maxima. “The provisioning tool gives you the ability to spin up new capacity on demand without technical intervention.”

Shepherd also points out that a cloud service includes far more than you get when you buy a server.

“You can get bandwidth into the server, patching, backups, repairs, replacement when it reaches end of life, possibly Windows licensing and so forth,” he says. “This can make cloud computing seem expensive for small installations, but it does protect you from the hidden costs of owning server hardware.”

More when you need it

Another problem with growth, particularly if it’s seasonal or project-driven, is that after the peak period passes, you’re left with idle equipment, which will be a drain on your business if you can’t find another use for it. It also means that you need to add additional costs to your services and products to pay for the seasonal peaks, which can make your business less-competitive.

For example, if you need extra capacity at Christmas, the conventional route is to buy an extra server, which gets used for three months, but then sits idle for the rest of the year. With cloud technology, if you need a web server to cope with the extra traffic that arises during the run up to the festive season, then you only need to pay for the it while it’s in use. The other nine months of the year you can use the money you would have spent servicing the debt on other things. Additionally, if you need some extra computing power to help speed up a project, you can source it from a cloud service, turn it off when it’s no longer required and pay no more.

Finally, cloud also allows you to budget for growth. Bringing in new infrastructure inevitably also brings in extra overheads. There are the additional software licences and extra maintenance costs, insurance, while at some point the infrastructure will need to be replaced with new equipment that needs to be budgeted for. With cloud there are no hidden costs. You know exactly what you will be paying for, now and in the future, making budgeting for growth far easier.

Growing a business isn’t for everyone, but with cloud computing the inherent risks can be reduced, and that’s got to be a good reason to start looking at growing your business now. In fact, Shepherd believes that the cloud benefits of having no legacy, minimum fixed costs and access to the latest technology tip the playing field away from the established larger company and towards the new venture.

“What’s more, being able to say our systems are backed by a larger vendor also gives credibility,” he adds. “Quite simply, larger business that wait too long to embrace cloud will see more nimble competitors sprint past them.”

Steven Shepherd
Sales and Business Development Director, Cloud
www.maxima.co.uk
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