With little capital outlay in setting-up and elastic scalability, the cloud is enabling SMEs to have the infrastructure to compete for large contracts without expensive upfront costs – making it a valuable lifeline in a recession.
Harvey Davies, owner and director of iStorCloud believes that although the public sector may be tightening its belt, meaning that there are fewer contracts available; with cloud infrastructure SMEs can increase their chances of winning the crucial business that is available.
He said: “When we look at a client of ours within the private health sector, moving to the cloud was the defining moment of their year. It gave them the capabilities to bid alongside much bigger companies for huge NHS contracts that would have otherwise come with equally large IT costs.”
Adam Swanson, business manager at Transalis, explained that not only does the cloud level the playing field for SMEs, it also provides companies with benefits that an in-house infrastructure could not.
He said: “A lot of work that we do is to reassure businesses that they do not need to have all of their IT resource in-house. Moving to the cloud and onto a piece of our infrastructure means that they do not have to manage, monitor or even worry about their IT. It also equips them with capabilities far beyond the servers that they had on site that had a higher investment outlay.”
Paul Harris, marketing director at hosting specialist UKFast said: “In times like these, anything that allows bosses to focus on the ‘nuts and bolts’ of a business, safe in the knowledge that the IT function is running smoothly in the background is crucial, especially when that technology has the potential to cut costs and increase competitiveness.”
“We have most of our infrastructure within the cloud,” said Andy Still, technical director at Intechnica. “We choose to do this so that we don’t have to worry about managing it in-house and can concentrate on growth in other areas. It allows us to be very agile as a fast-growing business.”
The debate on the application of cloud technology was held at City Tower in Manchester and hosted by UKFast.