Public clouds: a game changer for small businesses

Public cloud services such as Amazon AWS may be relatively new to you but unless you live “off-grid” you probably benefit from them in some form every day. Businesses of all sizes and scale as well as popular sites such as Spotify and Netflix all use AWS to support them in delivering great services. And there are a good many reasons why.

While the primary purpose of public clouds is to house data safely, speedily and cost-effectively through increased server resilience, centralisation and reduced onsite costs, public clouds help to facilitate growth. Small businesses with limited resources are particular beneficiaries. Able to expand without the huge costs associated with upscaling on-premises infrastructure and to buy resources on a variable basis, staff can roll out new ideas quickly and affordably. Businesses are also freed from the limitations imposed by their own infrastructure that so often governs innovation and growth. This makes it particularly attractive to the business with unpredictable workloads. SMEs can also leave the backend maintenance of the servers to the experts and reduce IT staff costs.

For businesses with a dynamic website, sites such as AWS (keep an eye out for our future article on public clouds from popular vendors) have another added value. With the capacity to deliver the dynamic portions of a website that alter for each end-user, businesses can simply and affordably improve their performance, reliability and global reach. This is enabled through the ability to configure multiple origin servers and multiple cache behaviours for download distribution and to query string parameters that support customisation. Performance improvements have also been added to speed up the delivery of dynamic content using services like Amazon Cloudfront.

Utilising these resources is particularly useful to the SME juggling limited finances and bank loans. With the ability to deliver multiple messages across multiple markets quickly without costly infrastructure or burdensome IT departments suddenly the business paradigm can shift globally and the SME can enter new markets. Coupled with an application monitoring tool to monitor website and server uptime and performance, cloud computing undoubtedly gives every business the very real potential to become an Amazon in their own right.

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