Accelerating Cloud Innovation for Small and Medium Businesses

Nearly every small and medium-sized business (SMB) leader has heard the cloud can save them money, but there’s more to it than the benefits of getting out of buying, managing, and maintaining hardware. For example, one of our customers, Mindable, is leveraging the AWS Cloud to change how they innovate their business. The results are impressive. By rethinking how the cloud can support their goals, they’ve been able to reduce costs by 40 percent, with another 20 percent savings expected in the near future. That is money they can re-invest in the business to accelerate growth.

So how do companies like Mindable do it?

Growth, innovation, and transformation

Many small and medium businesses want to grow and are willing to innovate. But you’ve probably seen the analysis paralysis that impacts many resource-constrained organizations when trying to determine what bets to make when deploying new technology. With legacy approaches requiring investment in hardware and software, it is expensive to try and fail. The time spent attempting to de-risk investments costs momentum, and good ideas end up getting shelved due to lack of resources.

One thing that really resonates with small and medium-sized businesses working with AWS Cloud is the ease of experimenting. With the cloud, there is little to no impact economically if an idea doesn’t work. Companies can try out new methods, services, processes, and technologies to find what will best fit their businesses, without the costly investment in expertise and time. The cloud is the ultimate sandbox, designed to take the risk out of experimenting so you can go through more cycles quickly and get to success faster.

New to digitization or looking to add more cloud capabilities to your SMB? Explore solutions by industry, benefit, use case, and more on AWS Smart Business

Benefits of cloud computing for SMB

As an AWS Premier Partner, we encourage customers to consider three fundamental ways to maximize cloud benefits— technology, processes, and staff—based on best practices.

Technology

First, reducing your dependency and reliance on managing your own infrastructure is a key element to maximizing the cloud investment. A significant benefit of working with AWS is the operational excellence built into the cloud. Businesses need to change their perspective from managing hardware to managing infrastructure as code. Embracing the idea of managing your infrastructure as code allows you to benefit from the automation that comes with it. You can bring up new environments quickly and securely, scale up or down rapidly to adjust to the changing demands of the business, and invest more time and energy into the core needs of your organization.

Processes

Next, there are processes that occur hundreds or thousands of times a day in many businesses. if you think about impacting just one of them by a fraction, it has a compounding effect. AWS big data services allow any small or medium business to apply the power of machine learning to things like protective maintenance and anomaly detection where incremental improvements add up quickly.

Staff Development

Finally, taking advantage of the latest technologies should not have to wait on an expensive new hire. Education and training to build an understanding of cloud native technologies is part of fully leveraging the cloud. When we work with AWS customers, we train and mentor in house IT staff, working side by side. The close collaboration enables your team to have an increasingly positive impact as their skill sets expand.

Reducing friction in the move to cloud

Moving to the cloud is not an all or nothing proposition—evolution is possible. Understanding the business goals you are trying to achieve is a key step in determining how and when to migrate to the cloud.

AWS understands the constraints of small and medium-sized businesses and has developed go-to-market resources to help accelerate cloud migration. For example, we had a customer that wanted to migrate, but given resource constraints, they decided it had to wait until they had secured an important contract. This created its own set of challenges since starting the migration after the contract was secured would put them in catch-up mode. We helped the customer to access AWS programs that allowed them to pull in the migration. Instead of being behind, they were able to hit the ground running.

While there might be a tendency to think it will be cheaper or easier to go it alone, you get to business benefits faster when you leverage the experience of those that came before you. Take advantage of a good partner and avoid common pitfalls that might limit the value the cloud can generate for your business.

Becoming more nimble

Getting started always begins with an assessment to get a current view of your platform and needs. This is where the planning begins for your workloads. This is also when you begin to see how infrastructure as code can change your perspective and free up your resources. A clear assessment and a business outcome-driven plan sets a good foundation.

Benefiting early from automation is an important way to inspire change and start envisioning how the cloud can transform operations. The AllCloud Next-Gen Landing Zone automates AWS, helping organizations quickly set up the correct account structures, establish security baselines, and configure networks. In just a few hours, customers can set up a highly compliant environment based on established best practices for migration, operations, and security.

Growing your business with a technology partner

The cloud offers small and medium-sized businesses a way to try more ideas, experiment with new technology, and accelerate the innovation cycle without the cost or risk of traditional models. With a different approach to technology and process, and a means to increase the impact of your existing team, the cloud is exactly what the resource constrained organization needs to accelerate growth. Read how you can work with an AWS Partner to meet your needs.

Disclaimer: The content and opinions in this post are those of the third-party author and AWS is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this post.