Perhaps one of the greatest inventions ever to hit the world of technology, if you can classify it as an invention rather than an advancement, is cloud computing. Having the ability to work in the cloud offers so many benefits for a small business just starting out that now even startups in emerging nations in Africa can afford to make their presence known in an international marketplace.
The Ease at Which You Can Stake a Claim to Real Estate in the Cloud
It is so easy to set up shop in the cloud that you don’t even need to worry about highly technical functions like containers vs. virtual machines and container orchestration to keep everything nicely compartmentalized. The only thing you have to know is that there are benefits to working in the cloud that give small businesses an opportunity to get out there and compete in a world where the big guys used to run the show. Your little piece of real estate in the cloud also offers a number of other benefits besides ease of use that you should be aware of.
Scalability Equals Cost-Effective Solutions
Consider for a moment what it would cost you to continually be moving from one location to the next as your company grows and sometimes shrinks from time to time. That’s a good analogy for what it’s like setting up shop in the cloud. Instead of buying a bigger, faster and better mainframe for your business, you can simply take up greater or lesser space in the cloud. Everything your company needs to do on a computer no longer needs to be handled locally with a huge computer system along with a large assortment of software for every aspect of your business that can cost a small fortune.
Choosing the Platform and Features You Need
There are cloud platforms that allow you to do everything from managing your business to interacting with customers and all for a small ‘rental’ fee. In other words, the cloud platform you choose to work with has everything from ERPs to CRMs and you can pick and choose which features you need to use and those you don’t need to contract in order to keep costs low. You choose the Platform as a Service (PaaS) and from there it’s a piece of cake. Everything is a web-based application so the only real big investment for you is the actual cost of production within your industry.
While all the world’s developed nations have taken advantage of cloud computing since the infancy days, this technology is only just becoming widely known in many emerging nations. What you can take away from all this is that cloud computing enables small businesses in developing nations to have many of the very same advantages as the huge multi-national corporations without a huge cost working against their bottom line. This is just what many nations in Africa have been waiting for and it’s why working in the cloud is going to put these nations on the map once and for all in the world of commerce.
