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Use Cloud Computing to Achieve Small Enterprise Savings

Small businesses are in a unique position to gain advantage with cloud computing.

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Your Challenge

  • Situation. Cloud computing offers a compelling opportunity for small businesses to reduce IT costs. Cloud costs are orders of magnitude lower than the per unit costs of internally developed IT resources.
  • Complication. Can the cloud be trusted? Are there hidden costs and pitfall areas that need to be considered?
  • Solution. It's all about cost per unit of capacity plus risk management. Evaluate the capacity and risk requirements of candidate workloads as well as cloud providers to find a match that will save the enterprise money.

Our Advice

Critical Insight
  • Low-cost barrier to entry and rapid deployment of cloud solutions provides proof on concept without breaking the bank. However, low-cost entry does not mean lower overall cost.
  • For small enterprises, the cloud (like other disruptive technology) is about risk management and risk tolerance. Small enterprises tend to have little to spend and less to lose than larger enterprises.
Impact and Result

Info-Tech's three rules of cloud investment provide a framework for asking the right questions about the enterprise's tolerance for the main risk factors of the cloud and its ability to mitigate that risk.


Get to Action

  1. Track what your peers are doing in this area

    Take advantage of lessons learned and get actionable advice from leaders at organizations like yours.

  2. Master external cloud basics
  3. Evaluate cloud computing options

    Assess risk tolerance and mitigate that risk for your organization.

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Small businesses are in a unique position to gain advantage with cloud computing.

Solution Road Map

Other Solution Sets in Server & Storage Virtualization

  1. Get the Most out of Server Virtualization
    Develop a strategy to move infrastructure from a virtual fantasy to a virtual reality.
  2. Vendor Landscape: Server Virtualization
    Server virtualization continues to drive value in infrastructure consolidation and management while laying the foundation of private and public computing.
  3. Avoid Server Virtualization Implementation Pain
    Virtualization is not a magic bullet. Poor scoping of infrastructure and business needs will lead to implementation pain.
  4. Leverage Server Virtualization for DR Affordability and Agility
    Virtualization is not just for consolidation - drive cost and complexity out of system availability and restore.
  5. Build an Optimized Infrastructure-as-a-Service Internal Cloud
    The best computing cloud is the one you've already started with server virtualization.
  6. Use Cloud Computing to Achieve Small Enterprise Savings
    Small businesses are in a unique position to gain advantage with cloud computing.
  7. Vendor Landscape: Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service
    Options are proliferating as Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service provides a highly agile and low capital cost option for outsourcing IT infrastructure.
  8. Manage & Plan Capacity for the Internal Cloud
    You cannot afford to assume that the data center has unlimited capacity; this is even more true for the internal cloud.
  9. Vendor Landscape: Cloud Management
    Add a layer of abstraction and automation to your infrastructure to create a private, virtual private, public, or hybrid cloud environment.
  10. Power the IaaS Cloud with a Cloud Management Solution
    Virtualization alone does not provide the automation, self-service, orchestration, and metering you need to offer a true cloud infrastructure service.
View the full Solution Road Map