Backup & Beyond (mostly beyond)

Why many SMBs are reluctant to Cloud?

“Cloud Computing” – a buzz word that’s on the peak of Hype Cycle for quite some time now is still a ‘jargon’ to many SMBs and Mid Market Companies. It was interesting to see the results of the ‘cloud hosting awareness survey’ conducted by RackSpace that more than two thirds of the SMBs in US are not familiar with the term “Cloud Hosting” – Wow!

Now, two questions immediately arise in our mind. Is that the Small Businesses failed to grasp the cloud computing technology or the Cloud hosting providers done a horrendous job in marketing to that segment? I can understand why cloud hosting providers are more catered towards the ‘enterprise segment’ expecting some big deals ($$$) instead of focusing on mom and pop services which are typical of SMBs.

Now that even if the cloud hosting providers turned their flash light on SMBs and started to focus on this segment, they are faced with two big questions (barriers) that needs a fix.

1) Security and privacy concerns
2) Benefit over existing hosting service

A recent Forrester survey reveals that 51% of SMB survey respondents cited security and privacy concerns as their top reason for not adopting cloud computing yet. Small Businesses need a TRUE value proposition on why they need to move their data out of their premises and the real business value they derive out of it. These are some prime reasons on why many SMBs are still reluctant to cloud.

Why SMBs need the cloud?

BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Time frame) is one(four) good reason on why Small Businesses need the cloud – Sounds like a typical sales pitch?

Budget – The cost of running and managing an in-house data center is increasing exponentially year by year and more than the hardware cost, it’s the support & management cost and business app cost etc… that are the real pain points. On top of it, increasing cost for the maintenance required for the datacenter, electrical power supplies, cooling, bandwidth etc… are some prime factors on why SMBs need the cloud.

Authority – When small businesses require a business app, it has to go through lots of stages especially when maintained in-house. Right from staging, development, testing, production and fail over environment, the in-house IT department will be working on lots of other items as well in order to bring up the business app. Now if there should be a technical problem with the storage devices or servers, SMBs typically don’t have the situation under control and have to rely on the hardware vendor’s technical support.

Need – SMBs usually do not have remote data centers for managing their offsite data backup requirements. Data Backup is more than a need – a mandate for running successful businesses. Businesses without proactive backup and recovery policies are likely to be OUT OF BUSINESS within 2 years of a major disaster. Replication to a cloud platform is an effective data backup and recovery strategy and helps Small Businesses to withstand a data disaster.

Timeframe – Small businesses don’t have to go through a typical two week purchase order process and additional two weeks of configuration, staging, testing etc… in order for a Business Application to be available for production use. With Cloud Computing, they can get up and running in few days and this quick process will have a profitable impact on the business.


Small Businesses have always more reasons to shift their data out of their premises and move it to the cloud. But they are reluctant and held up and what they need is the right message that “Your Data is Safe and Your Business is Protected” to get them up and running on the cloud.

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

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