We’ve all seen the headlines and statistics about cloud adoption. 78% of small businesses are set to have complete cloud adoption by 2020. The cloud market to grow to $141 billion (with a B) by 2019. IaaS and PaaS forecasted to grow $27% – 30% annually. But beyond leveraging Salesforce.com and Microsoft 365, how are SME’s actually using the cloud and what are they gaining from it? For many, it’s focus. Focus on not just running the technology for their business, but a focus on running and growing their business.

One SME I worked with had roughly 100 users all supported by 7 or 8 servers, including an Exchange server. They virtualized all of the servers that they were using and migrated to Office 365. Even though they wound up paying a bit more per month than they did with the hardware-based solution, they were able to reduce the resources required to manage their infrastructure (a much higher expense) and reallocate that budget to resources and activities they needed to grow their business.

A larger company I worked with built a large private cloud to offset the cost of maintaining their infrastructure. Again, the IT staff at this company were devoting almost all of their time to the care and feeding of the infrastructure and not on the core business. With the private cloud, they were able to refocus their paid experts on innovation for the business and not just on ensuring servers were online.

These are two fairly simple examples of how SME’s leveraged the cloud to refocus their resources, but the real lesson here is that had these companies just compared the isolated monthly costs, they wouldn’t have gained the benefit they have. Instead, they took a more holistic view, understanding the time, effort, and attention that their IT infrastructure was impacting and made the change to free their resources to refocus. Interested in developing a strategy for leveraging cloud in your business? Contact us now for a free cloud assessment.