Why Are SMEs Heading Towards Cloud Computing? Date:   Tuesday , August 23, 2016 Headquartered in Mumbai, Shivaami Cloud Services enables the businesses to embrace Cloud technology to its fullest potential and achieve real results from varied applications and platforms. It has a clientele of 4,000 businesses and is also a Google For Work premier partner in India. Cloud computing provides better business performance with portability, flexibility, efficiency, disaster recovery, security and productivity. Today \'cloud\' is redefining the way small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) do business. Cloud platforms allow SMEs to be more competitive, agile and productive, thus increasing their profitability and enabling faster business growth. According to Gartner, \"The use of cloud computing is growing, and by 2018, at least 30 percent service-centric companies will move a majority of their ERP applications to the cloud\". Cloud acts as a game changer, particularly for small and medium businesses, by offering scalable infrastructure and \'on-demand\' services. Companies with smaller IT teams often find it difficult to keep their IT infrastructure updated with frequent upgrades and continuous addition of new features and capabilities. With the help of cloud, they can easily manage complexities, work smarter and utilize their resources in a much more effective way. Cloud service providers not only provide you access to the latest technologies, but also extend support in terms of regular upgrades and maintenance, thereby reducing your day-to-day operational challenges. Cloud computing has created a revolution of sorts among different types of businesses, from new age tech start-ups to retail and e-commerce companies, or even traditional businesses that want to scale up quickly. The key advantages SMEs can get by adopting cloud computing are: Less Expenditure, More Innovation With cloud-based services, businesses can significantly reduce the need for large IT teams for maintaining infrastructure, thereby saving money and increasing profits. It moves the organization from a Cap-ex to Op-ex model, which means they don\'t have to make huge investments in buying fixed assets or creating an IT infrastructure. Most of the IT assets and services are made available by the cloud service provider. This allows growing companies to spend more time and effort on core business activities, thereby enabling more innovation and improving growth prospects. Better Security than Traditional IT Systems Traditional IT infrastructure with fixed assets can be more prone to security risks; but that can be mitigated by moving to a more automated and scalable IT environment with cloud computing. The cloud platform comes with sophisticated, high level security protocol that ensures better protection for your critical business data. Apart from access to the latest security technologies such as data encryption, data backup, intrusion detection, network monitoring and so on, small and medium businesses get the advantage of best-in-class solutions for disaster recovery and business continuity. Greater Reliability, No Downtime A managed service platform based on cloud computing offers far greater reliability and availability than in-house IT infrastructure. Organizations can benefit tremendously from a massive pool of redundant IT resources. If a server fails, hosted applications and services can easily be transmitted to any of the other available servers by providing a quick fail-over mechanism. Server crashes that used to be commonplace are now manageable by using load balancing, a technique that helps in reducing downtime. Enables MBaaS or Mobile-Based Apps Cloud-based mobile application development is easy to use and enables developers to quickly create new features. Cloud-enabled MBaaS not only reduces development time, but is also more cost effective and allows developers to focus on more complex and pertinent applications related to data storage, user management, push notifications, and other mobile APIs. Cloud-based MBaaS not just enables a faster rollout of services, but also provides a far better mobile experience to users. Improves Collaboration for Employees \'On the Go\' Sales staff or employees who are often \'on the move\' can easily access company data for meetings or business interactions wherever they are. Employees in different geographical locations can easily collaborate and work together with a common pool of resources. This also saves a lot of time and money. More Opportunities for Smart Working Multiple applications can be integrated with the cloud to enable smarter working. In fact, system administrators are now looking for more innovative ways to leverage the cloud computing model. The ability to enhance the cloud experience and have cross-cloud compatibility has helped form the Cloud API (Application Programming Interface) environment. Now, administrators can integrate applications and other workloads into the cloud using these APIs. Flexibility & Agility with PPU Model Cloud-based services offer a lot of flexibility to smaller business with their pay-per-use approach. SMEs can save money by using a part of the services they need and pay accordingly. As they grow bigger and their needs expand, they can easily add more users, or increase their usage and scale up quickly. This makes them more agile and competitive, thereby helping them achieve their business targets easily.