For small businesses and startups, resources are expensive. There is never enough talent, time, and money to solve business problems. Comparatively, there’s also never been an easier time to start a business due to the power of the cloud.

The pandemic has served as a forcing function for business leaders, accelerating their leverage of cloud technology. They are overcoming human capital limitations with cloud solutions. This generation of entrepreneurs are not worrying about server costs, data center power and cooling, managing the underlying infrastructure, and the long tail of ancillary costs; and it’s all due to the cloud. Small business and startup owners clearly understand this, as 62% of companies expanded or upgraded their cloud usage in the first half of 2020.

Effects of Cloud Usage Expansion

The recent shifts to the cloud allowed companies to quickly get up and running, making it easy for all organizations to break into new markets. Hundreds of thousands of these startups are starting their entrepreneurial dreams with the cloud every day.  And every year the number of companies born in the cloud continues to explode.

Overall, businesses have reaped great benefits from their cloud upgrades and expansions. Companies are scaling up their business operations and opening new avenues for revenue, enabling them to reimagine their business possibilities. The way they see their cloud providers is changing, too, as they now seek to work with them as thought partners vs. vendors simply selling a product.

Speed & Flexibility

Twenty years ago, if someone wanted to test a business idea, they had to run to a computer store, purchase multiple products, set up, install, and configure their technology. Then, they had to work hard to figure out if they had a viable business. Now, if someone thinks they have an idea for the next best e-commerce business, they can spin up a platform and have it running for their customers in days, hours, or minutes — all in a cost effective way. With the cloud, businesses can test hypotheses and see if they resonate with customers at internet speed.

For established small and medium businesses, the cloud enables them to add different lines of business — commerce, security, service, etc. — to see if it resonates with their marketplace. And if it’s not received well, it can be shut down. Before, there were multiple factors to think about (i.e. how many employees are needed, real estate and physical space, DevOps gurus, etc.). Now, the cloud makes it easy to validate ideas, rapidly fail, learn and iterate. It is the reason small businesses use the cloud to build their companies today.