Is your start-up at the stage where you’re just starting to consider moving to the cloud? Or, if you’re one of the lucky ones, perhaps your business is growing so fast that you’re worried about how to scale up? As we move into 2018, businesses are turning their attention to how they can use tech and the cloud to accomplish their business objectives.
We’ve compiled a list of five cloud computing tips for strategic entrepreneurs, based on our expert knowledge of cloud trends and applications.
1. Don’t shell out millions
Today the cloud offers unlimited, on-demand storage and computing power at extremely affordable pricing. Back in the day, your business had to have deep pockets to the tune of hundreds of thousands of rand, and probably an outsourced IT team too. Today, you can pay a fraction of the price to get exactly the same service, with none of the overhead stresses that come with installing servers, managing server rooms, hiring IT consultants, and securing your systems. From a cost perspective, there’s no better time to be building a business!
2. Understand both your current needs and long term goals
The full a la carte offering on cloud can seem daunting, especially when presented with an endless list of options when choosing provider, data warehouse, dev environment, storage types and other architectural components. A good starting point is to assess your current business and technical problems that can be addressed with cloud, and aligning this with your future goals and strategic objectives. When using the cloud you will reduce your cost per transaction but, depending on the size of the cloud system you use, this cost can vary.
Early on, it is important to keep your overall compute costs low. Once your business starts to expand, you can access more expensive compute to do heavier lifting. It is critical to plan this growth and investment.
When you get the architecture right from the start, you can then let the system evolve independently into a fully scalable, automated engine that drives your productivity down the line. For example, your business’ immediate requirement might be a vision analytics solution that analyses facial expressions associated with a product you sell. It’s important to consider both the tool that achieves this immediate requirement, as well as the scalable storage structure to house the data collected when performing smart predictions based on 5, 10 or 50 years worth of aggregated facial expressions.
3. Cater for scalability
Living in the age of viral apps and millions of followers, overnight sensationalism has become the norm and with it comes the desperate need for scalability. At the height of your viral trajectory, getting a single 404 page or failed payment gateway is a deadly dagger to your start-up, which can be irrecoverable for your business.
The cloud provides various options to cater for scaling up – your initial traditional architecture can be made to be easily scalable so that you can cope with the load when it comes. Always keep scalability at the forefront of your architectural requirements, and make sure that the engine under the hood is powered by platform-as-a-service, containerisation and other automated scaling services that cope with your load as you soar to millions of downloads!
4. Machine Learning can help you grow your start-up even quicker
The cloud is no longer just about storage. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and other words that sound like they’re from your favourite Sci-Fi movie are now a part of your toolbox. And that doesn’t mean you need a PhD in computer science to use them.
Cloud providers have invested billions into research teams to build out programming interfaces to easily do vision analytics, natural language processing, speech to text and other off-the-shelf machine learning products. Machine learning is redefining the way we think and do business, and it’s imperative to incorporating smart analytics into your business roadmap.
5. Take security seriously
2017 Made a name for itself as the year of more cyber attacks than any other in history, and unfortunately South Africa ranks the 31st most attacked country in the world, with businesses losing some R50 billion in the process. Having a data and application back-up and recovery plan is vital. The great thing is that the cloud makes this seamless, pain-free and affordable.
Most startups take the approach to backup like one would backup their music or pictures to a external storage device, with regulation and governance now a must for startups to compete against the traditional players they too need to be compliant, but with Backup and disaster recovery becoming accessable and easy to manage. This is a no brain to keep your licence to operate., with military grade encryption standards, smart data centres, and stacks of ISO certifications to address all your data sovereignty, confidentiality and disaster recovery requirements.