HOW SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED BUSINESSES DRIVE CLOUD ADOPTION

Small and medium-sized businesses will be the driving force behind the cloud adoption this year. This will happen due to two things.

First of all, the cloud presents an amazing and cost-effective opportunity to utilise the services that are often not available and affordable for an office to have to have in-house.

Secondly, this will happen because the cloud is the easiest and scalable market demographic for service providers to drive sales.

Take for example the widespread adoption of Microsoft Office 365. It is a direct cloud replica of what many people are already used to in a classical office infrastructure sense (Microsoft Exchange email).

Office 365 provides the same functionality, except there is no need to buy hardware or purchase licensing for the entire server. Simply hosting a few mailboxes through another hosting provider is the easiest way to adopt the service. And then attached to that, one can explore the plethora of add-on services which further extend the functionality of Office 365 mailboxes.

The service is made even more attractive to all users across the board through many other tools such as backup, analytics, additional file storage and many. Service providers use this as an attractive opportunity to increase recurring revenue and for the end users to adopt and use the service without having to make or commit to any large investments.

This trend sits among many other examples that will drive the cloud adoption by SMBs in the next 12-18 months and will likely be the largest service adoption shift that the IT market space has seen in some time.