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Five reasons to move to cloud

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 17 Apr 2015
Moving to the cloud allows businesses to easily scale up or down.
Moving to the cloud allows businesses to easily scale up or down.

The cloud is now ready to burst into the mainstream small and medium enterprise (SME) market, says Sage.

The accounting company notes that, in 2012, only 9% of SMEs were using cloud services, and in 2014, the number climbed to 22%, according to research from World Wide Worx.

But SME adoption of the cloud is sure to explode as bandwidth increases, connectivity costs fall, and a new generation of digital entrepreneurs move into business, says Ivan Epstein, co-founder of Softline and CEO of Sage Australia, Asia, Middle East and Africa.

"As a younger generation comes into the workforce, they are looking to use business IT resources online and on-demand in the same way as they use services such as Gmail and Dropbox," says Epstein. This way of working has a large number of direct benefits for small businesses.

Epstein notes there are five good reasons why small businesses should consider the cloud:

1. Less infrastructure and maintenance: With a cloud-based software application, the responsibility for IT maintenance, software upgrades and any system issues lies with the service provider. This allows companies to escape the need for time-consuming and often expensive IT maintenance and focus on the core business.

2. Flexibility to scale up or scale down business: Cloud-based software can be accessed on a pay-as-you-go model, allowing companies to increase use of the service as the business grows, and also to decrease spend if there is a need to scale down. This is particularly useful for variable staffing needs.

3. Moving to the cloud is easy: There is no hardware or infrastructure that needs to be installed and as soon as the product is bought online, companies can get started. In addition, many cloud-based software applications cater for non-expert users.

4. Increased security: Cloud computing can be more secure than traditional IT. Established cloud suppliers invest vast amounts of money into securing their applications and have technology infrastructures beyond the means of any small business. There is also less risk of losing data stored on a laptop or a USB stick because everything is stored in the cloud and not on devices.

5. Better collaboration, more flexibility: Cloud computing allows users to work anytime and anywhere - just so long as they have an Internet connection and a device with a modern Web browser. Staff can collaborate closely, accessing and working on the same documents in real-time.

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