Technology is evolving at warp speed. Eight short years ago, Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 was cutting-edge technology.
Small Businesses were running their own Exchange Email Server and critical business functions were reliant at keeping that one server up and running. Fast Forward to 2019—those same businesses’ critical services are now hosted in the Cloud. The business case for buying a server for your office is mostly gone.
No Need to Guesstimate Your Storage, RAM, and Processor Needs When Using the Cloud
So, let’s say your business is not that small, and you have several servers in your Data Room that you purchased five years ago. Odds are, your hardware warranty is expired, and the servers are becoming unreliable.
What’s next? A capital investment? The old paradigm is to estimate how much storage, RAM, and processing power you will need in those new servers. Typically, this results in either an overbuy or an underbuy of resources. Either way, that’s a big cash layout that adds the unnecessary headache of managing hardware.
Enter Cloud Providers Like Microsoft Azure & Amazon Web Services
Cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and AWS allow you to provision what you need now and upgrade or downgrade as needed. You’ll only pay for what you use—heck, you can even shut the stuff off at night and not pay for it if you are not using it.
The use case for the cloud goes beyond cost-savings. Security audits and proof of compliance are becoming the norm across many industries. Companies are beginning to require as a prerequisite to doing business with them, that businesses show that their IT systems, policies and procedures adhere to a standard. Azure and AWS provide help business comply with these requirements by both having industry accepted security controls and compliance programs in place (i.e. SOC 3, ISO 27018), as well as highly available data centers with huge bandwidth and redundant internet connections.
Conclusion
Overall, small businesses can rely on hosting servers in the cloud as products like Microsoft Azure and AWS offer cost-savings and flexibility, security compliance, and highly available solutions.