UPDATED 09:07 EDT / MAY 31 2011

How SMBs Actually Journey to the Cloud: Infographic

Many organizations are still trying to traverse the road to cloud. Small to medium businesses are good examples of these. Enterprises are beginning to decipher the competitive advantage they can carve by getting into the cloud arena. Cloud adoption trends currently show that most SMB’s are still conservative and uses simple office applications. In the next two years, it is predicted that cloud technologies will enable faster growth of these SMB’s, which are very keen on cost-saving efforts.

In an infographic on SMB’s voyage to the cloud (see below), there are four key points that highlighted the present and future situation. These SMB’s, instead of utilizing a single data center or terminal to store the massive amount of all sorts of data will be relying on cloud applications that will make these information available in the internet—this is comparable to that of online banking and online shopping. The numbers are quite revealing, with the US market taking $3.2 billion out of the $8 billion worldwide market for cloud computing, which is equivalent to roughly 40%.  But perhaps, what would be more technically interesting are the factors that make cloud apps appealing to SMB’s. According to the same infographic, there are three: cost, accessibility and ease of set-up and use.

Popular cloud apps that include online customer self-scheduling, data storage and backup, human resources software, online payment programs and many more, are a hit globally. These apps include Carbonite and DropBox, frontrunners in the back-up market. What is more fascinating about this is that these two are actually attacking the file-sharing challenges from opposite directions. The range where cloud can resolve issues are quite vast.

The journey to the cloud of various companies has been featured in major conferences and events within the tech community. The recent Citrix Synergy 2011 showcased Xiotech, and CEO George Symons talks about how radically changing their philosophy on tremendous storage amount and IOS performance have enabled them to ease the storage quandary of desktop virtualization and VDI platforms. Cloud expert Siki Giunta of CSC also stopped by theCube during the last SAP Sapphire event and discussed how the cloud will shape the future of information technology.  The young and vibrant Box.net was represented by Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck at the EMC World 2011.

SMB’s may still be not 100% certain of going to the cloud, but the majority of them will, sooner or later. Especially as key players in the industry are now keeping an eye on them and investing on services that would cop their market, like Cisco.


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