How can cloud computing help small businesses?

There are many ways that cloud computing can help small businesses depending on their core operations, IT infrastructure needs, and areas for corporate improvement. However, many of these benefits rest on fundamental aspects of cloud computing systems that offer specific things to business owners and executives.

One of the most fundamental ways that cloud computing helps small businesses is that these web-delivered services can help them to integrate technologies that they could not implement or afford on their own. In some cases, businesses simply lack the resources to add hardware and software systems that would facilitate more internal operations. As an alternative, they can simply "buy" these technologies from cloud vendors.

Another part of how cloud computing helps small businesses is in its scalability. Through modern systems like multi-tenant infrastructure, cloud computing providers can offer flexibility for services where small businesses can essentially order from a menu of services and discontinue services when they are not needed. The scalability of cloud computing can offer great benefits and significant cost savings to many different kinds of small businesses.

Building on these basic benefits, cloud computing can often help small businesses to innovate or automate parts of specific business processes. Some of these have to do with data capture and aggregation, some of them have to do with knowing the customer better. Others apply to a manufacturing or product development plan, or to a service delivery model that supports a small business. Each small business scenario is different, but the benefits of cloud computing are widely applied, as experts predict that this type of model will cause tremendous shifts in the business world in coming years.