SMBs in the cloud -- managed services or in-house IT?

The cloud has become a truly winning innovation for companies of all sizes, causing a significant upturn within the IT sector and business as a whole. Previously, companies went to great lengths to scale their own in-house IT infrastructure, as it was seen as a great benefit to run the business through technology maintained on-site. Now however, there is a push toward an online service delivery model, leaving organizations wondering which setup is best for them.

In many aspects, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) stand to benefit the most from cloud-based technologies. Dealing with limited budget, it has not always been easy to for small companies to take advantage of information technology -- the purchase, upkeep, and eventual replacement of hardware is extremely expensive, not to mention the salaries paid to the IT professionals that maintain it. Fortune 500 companies can afford this type of capital costs, whereas SMBs could have travel outlaying that much cash.

But this has changed with the emergence of the implementation of cloud-based technologies. Instead of purchasing hardware and maintain their IT in-house, the option of managed hosting services now exists to give SMBs a cheaper alternative that will allow them to dedicate resources to other areas of need.

So just what are the benefits of managed services as compared to in-house IT? Let’s take a look:

• Reduction of Costs: Cloud-hosted servers enable mass-scale computing power and minimize IT requirements and physical storage, providing a substantial savings. Cloud solutions are also much faster to deploy than traditional hardware, which also allows businesses to have minimal project start-up costs and predictable ongoing operating expenses.
• Flexibility: As long as employees have access to the Internet, they can work from anywhere. You can be sure every user has an up-to-date picture of how the business is doing, no matter where he/she is.
• Ease of Collaboration: Saving and accessing files through the cloud allows everyone to work with the same set of content, according to access and permission controls implemented by administrator.
• Reduces Risk: When everything is stored in the cloud, data can still be accessed no matter what happens to a machine. Moreover, the cloud adds security for its users by backing-up data off-site, decreasing the potential for hackers, viruses, and other cyber-security issues.
• Improves Efficiency: After migrating to the cloud, companies should no longer worry about space considerations, power requirements, software updates etc. Using solutions provided by a reliable and presentable cloud service provider gives the ability for SMBs to use the latest solutions on offer in their field, which is giving the small companies the chance to be more competitive.

The cloud enables your IT infrastructure to progress as quickly as your business does. Moving forward with cloud solutions will bring your small business many benefits that at first-hand impact productivity and security. No matter what brunch of business you represent, cloud computing is a practice that you will want to integrate and after all adopt it.

Photo Credit: RPeshkova/Shutterstock

Anna Beletskaya is a Support Engineer at PlexHosted, having joined the PlexHosted team in early 2014 and in a short term has gained a high-level expertise in SharePoint hosting cloud solutions, as well as a number of other Microsoft products (Exchange, Lync) and McAfee SaaS email protection service. Anna is a qualified member of the company’s support team, which provides expert customer support for superior customer satisfaction. PlexHosted, founded in 2010, is a cloud based hosting company that specializes in managed SharePoint site deployments and associated infrastructure applications.