In the near future, it is estimated that more than 40 percent of small to medium-sized businesses will move to cloud and leverage the amazing benefits that cloud-computing provides. One of these cloud-computing technologies which is considered extremely favorable or small to medium-sized businesses is Amazon Web Services or AWS for short. The cloud infrastructure provided by AWS includes services viz computing, networking, storage, database resources, email, analytics, mobile development, security, and Servers Remote computing. These services as a whole allow a small to medium-sized business to run either all or a part of their existing infrastructure in the cloud which provides a ton of benefits. In this post, we are going to have a look at some of these benefits for small businesses that come from using AWS.
Advantages of using AWS for Small Businesses
- Get rid of Infrastructure Costs altogether
When, as a business, you are moving to cloud computing, you don’t require spending any money on setting up initial infrastructure or purchase any kind of hardware. This is because AWS is a cloud-based server and you will be utilizing the resources provided by Amazon. Also, when you are running on-premises hardware and software, there exists a plenitude of management activities like keeping track of performance, maintaining data security, replacing and updating the hardware and software respectively as and when the requirement comes up, preventing failures, and more. When you move to a cloud-based server, all these management activities will be taken care of by Amazon as well. Thus, not only you will be saving on infrastructure costs, but you also won’t require hiring dedicated professionals for hardware and software maintenance. This will leave you with enough time for your core task i.e. running your business.
- Run your business from Cloud
To get all the knowledge regarding Amazon Web Services (AWS), you can opt for AWS Certification online which will help you grasp all the related theoretical as well as practical concepts thereby enabling you to run your business efficiently from the cloud. The benefit of having your business in the cloud is that you can access your apps, documents, and other resources from any digital device quickly.
- Advantageous for E-commerce Businesses
Those who are particularly into the e-commerce business, moving to AWS will be particularly beneficial as Amazon, being e-commerce at heart, provides a plenitude of cloud solutions particularly catering to the ecommerce businesses. Apart from this, AWS comes with SDKs for Java, PHP, Ruby, and more thereby providing the small to medium-sized e-commerce businesses the much-needed flexibility that they should have for efficiently meeting the requirements of their customers.
- Provision of Mobile-App versions
AWS comes with mobile-app versions of the management dashboard; both for Android as well as iOS. This helps small businesses to stay connected 24/7 and access their services anytime/anywhere. Moreover, there exist other useful mobile services as well that allows these small to medium-sized businesses to create solutions, particularly for mobile users. This is highly beneficial as a major chunk of the tech-savvy population likes to access the internet from the convenience of their smartphone rather than turning ON their PC or laptop for the same.
- State-of-the-art security
AWS is capable enough to meet all kinds of security-related requirements. There is a number of data centers present all across the globe that is under strict monitoring and maintenance and provides a brawny backup capability for all the data and infrastructure associated with the business running on AWS. Hence, small to medium-sized business owners can stop worrying about data security and backups as well. Amazon Web Services will efficiently take care of the same for you.
In unfortunate situations, you can be sure that your data is completely backed up and your business can return to normal running scenario pretty soon. However, if you are holding on-premises infrastructure, then disaster recovery will take a lot of time and you may lose a chunk of essential data in the process.
- Scalability
You require paying for as many resources as you will be using. Later on, when the traffic coming to your business will increase, you can scale up your business by opting for more resources. Also, this can be done in reverse as well. If, as a small to a medium-sized business owner, you know that a period of low activity is coming up, for that time, you can scale down the resources that you are using and ultimately lower the overall sum you will be paying.
This scalability in both directions is next to impossible when running on-premises hardware and software. For upgrading, you have to spend a lot on purchasing and setting up the new hardware or updated software. Moreover, you will continue paying the same maintenance cost all the time, as there’s no efficient way to scale down the hardware during times of low activity.
- Low-Cost Migration
If you are thinking that the cost of moving your existing on-premises infrastructure to cloud might exceed your budget, then you can discard such thoughts as quickly as possible. Amazon realizes your concerns and provides all the necessary tools that you will require for moving your business to cloud in a simple, quick, and low-cost manner. During the entire process of migration, you will receive impeccable support from Amazon as well for your concerns, doubts, and queries.
Conclusion
Please note that this is not an exhaustive list. These are only some of the major benefits that AWS has for small to medium-sized businesses. So, if you are an owner of an SMB, you must not delay in acquiring AWS certification online and initiate the process of moving your business to cloud-based servers.