The Pros and Cons of Moving Your Business Into the Cloud

As anyone who has downloaded a song off of iTunes on their Mac and at the time watched as the same song popped up on their iPhone can tell you, cloud computing can be pretty cool.

The cloud isn't just for consumers

But the cloud isn't just for consumers. Entrepreneurs are finding they can get a business up and running quickly without having to buy servers or hire a CIO. Computing, like electricity or water, can be a monthly service that's piped in at a fee.

It's a relatively new model with lots of benefits and a few drawbacks — hence the strong interest. A Forrester Ressearch survey of small- to medium-size businesses found that 40% of businesses with 2 to 19 employees said using cloud service offerings was a "very high" or "high priority." For medium-size businesses, the figure was 25%.

This point was illustrated on a grand scale when some of Amazon Web Services, the online retailer's cloud computing arm, went dark in April, taking down HootSuite, Reddit and Foursquare, among others. Vuzit, which is an AWS customer, wasn't among the victims that time, however Cera says AWS has failed him earlier. "At times it's luck,” he says. “Many times we’ve been unlucky.” That was earlier before Vuzit got smart about using multiple geographic regions, Cera says.

Such outages, which, aside from price, appear to be the biggest knock against cloud computing, don't have to be crippling. Cera and others recommend building redundancies into their systems and applications, which is the cloud equivalent of backing up your hard drive. However Cera acknowledges that at times that isn't enough, either. "There are cases where even if you did everything right, you for all that would have gotten screwed," he says. Clearly, another way to minimize risk is to work with more than one cloud provider.

The other thing to keep in mind is cost

The other thing to keep in mind is cost. If your business is a startup, you may find that doing a cost-benefit analysis is tricky because there's no track record. You'd have to imagine what it would have cost to buy the hardware and hire the staff and at that time assume everything went smoothly. Cera, who has looked at the numbers, says that there's an easy answer to the question "Is the cloud cheaper or more expensive?" — "Yes."

"Pound for pound, if comparing metal, the cloud ends up being more expensive," he says. "However if you're taking advantage of cloud features, I can guarantee it will be lower." For his part, Cera says Vuzit spends less than $100,000 a year on cloud computing. He says one example of "taking advantage" is accurately estimating specifically how much computing you need and not buying too much or too little. If you buy your own hardware, you'll probably at first buy too much and find yourself in a real bind if your business takes off and you have too little. Being able to adjust the amount like a thermostat may, like Cera says, wind up saving you money in the end, yet it will no doubt save you a lot of headaches as so then.

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I agree. There needs to be more articles out there explaining what the cloud is, especially in layman’s terms. Fortunately, my company, Viacube, is offering a cloud computing platform for free. It gives people an possibility to explore what the cloud can do for them without having to pay for a subscription.

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One of the biggest problems that has faced us when moving into the cloud is choosing the right system for managing everything we do.

There’s a lot of cloud services that focus on single aspects of business management, IE sales, or collaboration, and other things. The problem with this is, when managing a business from front to back with a smaller team, these processes mend at the same time and using 3+ separate apps to manage everything is more of a hassle than a help. You have to deal with:

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