Indian Start-ups Should Ride The Cloud!

Cloud computing services (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) have over the years reduced the total cost of ownership (TCO) for many industry players. About ten years ago, when cloud services started becoming popular, the reigning thought was that only small and mid-size industry players will move to the cloud. But, today even largest players, across the globe and across industries, are leveraging cloud services to keep operational costs under control by paying-on-the go for the services instead of incurring high upfront capital expenditure.

Is Cloud suitable for all Indian businesses? Maybe, maybe not, but its ‘pay-as-you-go’ benefit makes it more lucrative as well as sensible option for Indian start-ups, who usually work on shoe-string budgets. Why should they pay or invest in storage space which they might not be using? This is one of the many instances where start-ups can save money and drastically bring down their operational costs by leveraging the Cloud technology for business resilience.

Let’s take a look at some of the immediate benefits that Cloud can deliver.

Reduce up-front costs by 30%
A report by O’Reilly Media shows that companies can save up to 30% in IT costs over a three-year period employing cloud resources versus on-premises equipment. This is a compelling proposition for the startups who would like to extract the maximum out of every penny available. The first three years are again very crucial years for a start-up. If the start-up is able to save 30% of its expenditure on IT- why should they think twice?

Freedom & ease to quickly scale up (or down)
Every organization likes predictability. Larger organizations can predict their future needs for various resources based on empirical data they have collected in the past. Things are however, different with start-ups. They can’t predict how and when the demand for various resources will go up (or down) and this unpreparedness can do serious damage to their bottom line. They can address this issue by moving some of their IT services to the Cloud, thereby converting majority of the fixed costs on IT into variable costs. This will enable predictability and thus help start-ups scale up/down storage space, processing space, number of email IDs etc. on the go.

Is cloud a safe bet?
Earlier, concerns on cloud services security and reliability were valid. Not today, when many big players have entered the arena with a vast portfolio of cloud services. Presence of companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce.com in the cloud services space has already instilled confidence among organizations.
Start using cloud resources now and save some precious rupees for marketing or expansion?