We always talk about how the Internet and cloud computing allows small businesses to be able to compete with the big guys. However, we do know that small businesses do have some perks that big businesses don’t have.
These days, it seems that the table has turned; big businesses now want to play the business game like the smaller businesses. One of the biggest upside of a small business compared to the bigger counterparts is the ability in responding to changes fast. The Internet accelerates small business’ responsiveness to changes even more; big businesses are working hard to catch up via reorganization and culture changes. Not stopping there, the new trends of cloud computing even make things easier for small and medium businesses to access the resources that once “owned” by big businesses.
Why big businesses fell threatened by the cloud?
You want to compete with eBay? Just clone the script, add value and more functions and start marketing, without worrying too much on resources. How so?
Well, eBay is well-visited, so it need powerful web servers and data centers to serve website access. The cloud allows such luxury to be accessible at affordable price tags, via pay-as-you-go/subscription payment methods and on-demand resource allocation.
Small businesses can cut starting up costs and the cloud let them to accommodate their growth via real-time scale up options (you can access more resources by paying more anytime you want, without any access interruptions.) This alone will speed up their growth by allocating the excess budget to more important operations, such as marketing and promotion, which can accelerate the growth even more.
A relief: However, Internet and the cloud is for everybody…
A relief to big business: The Internet and cloud computing allow them to do what small business can do – running business operations in the cloud, while enabling employees to work wherever they want, in any part of the world (as long as they have an Internet connection.)
This article is pretty much explaining that the cloud enables the big guys to do business like the smaller guys.
Big businesses can now respond to changes better – thanks to the Internet and cloud solutions. Need to call for a meeting with 100s of managers? Just sign-in to your choice of online collaboration tool in the cloud, and you can make decisions right away – just like a business of 5 employees can do.
Big business’ challenges
However, there are challenges big businesses to face before the can be as responsive as small businesses.
One of the challenges is cloud sprawl.
Cloud sprawl means cloud access that is “uncontrolled” or non-governed, in such a way that the company’s IT department has no idea what cloud solutions used by the staffs. This is a major headaches, as cloud sprawl leads to issues like reduced productivity and compromised security.
Governing how 100s – let alone 1,000s – of employees should use cloud solutions to help them do their job is a real hassle. However, as cloud sprawl is inevitable, minimizing the impact via communication and set rules is adequate enough.
