Cloud Computing and Small Business

Business Week's recent cover story article is on Google and Cloud Computing.  The article discusses Google's plan to allow users to directly access and use their enormous computer server farms and databases directly.  Key quote on small business:

"For small companies and entrepreneurs, clouds mean opportunity—a leveling of the playing field in the most data-intensive forms of computing."

Google is hardly the first company to do this. Cloud computing dates back to the early days of computing when computers were accessed across networks in a computing form called "timesharing". 

More recently, Amazon's Web Services program has been in place for several years and allows third parties to access and use Amazon's computing infrastructure across the Internet.  Amazon has thousands of small business customers for their cloud services.  Also, "software as a service" companies like Salesforce.com have been pushing this concept for years. 

For small businesses cloud computing not only provides access to world class computing infrastructures and large scale databases, it does this on an outsourced, variable cost basis.  This reduces capital costs and IT support requirements.  It also lets small businesses purchase exactly the amount of computing and data resources required.  The result is a more agile small business that can easily and quickly scale up and down based on demand. 

While cloud computing is getting a lot of press these days, business infrastructure in general is moving to the "cloud".  This shift is creating vast new opportunities for small business and is a topic that we will cover in more detail in our next forecast report.

For more on software as service see Anita Campbell's recent post on the topic on Small Business Trends.  Also, this weekend's New York Times has a good article describing how Google is using cloud computing to go after Microsoft Office.

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[Cloud Computing]

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