How to Scale Your Business With Cloud Services

Every company begins as an idea. As a small business owner, you’ve worked hard to bring your vision into a reality. Then, with a lot of love and labour, that idea grew into something bigger. Something real. It takes dedication to start a new business, whether you’re selling a service or a product or a combination of both. When your business starts to grow, your goals will adjust, and soon your sights are set on one thing: expansion. 

When many business owners start planning to scale their business, they often neglect adequately planning for their IT infrastructure. Instead, they start planning and investing in their marketing, or they might sit down and discuss their plans with their accountant or financial consultant. They may even hire a business coach to help guide them through the process. But without the proper IT system in place, your business will have trouble scaling.

To support growth in customers, services, or digital products, you need to have sufficient server space, efficient data management, and network security in place. The cloud is a solution for all those factors.

What Is the Cloud?

Rather than owning and maintaining a physical server in your building to host your programs, software, and data, the cloud is a virtual space hosted by servers housed in facilities known as data centres. These data centres can exist anywhere in the world because their clients access these cloud networks over the internet. 

Why Use the Cloud?

Companies that sell access to their cloud servers specialize in maintaining and securing their systems. A cloud provider needs to have an impeccable reputation for cybersecurity, network speed, and minimal downtime to be competitive.

Using cloud services to support your business activities means you don’t have to waste your resources on expensive infrastructure nor be responsible for securing your servers, both from physical threats and cyberthreats. It also means you have access to a lot more storage with the cloud than you would if you had to purchase your own physical server space. Cloud services give small companies the capacity and opportunity to scale their businesses without breaking their budgets.

How to Use the Cloud to Scale Your Business

To better illustrate how the cloud can help your business grow, let’s first imagine a brick-and-mortar store. Let’s use the example of a company that sells houseware items. As the demand for their houseware products grows, the business has two main options to support its expansion. They can choose to open another location to accommodate more product volume and more customers in the physical world, or they can begin selling merchandise online to reach an even larger market without the cost of additional real estate and the constraints of square footage.

Using the cloud to support the growth of your business virtually is similar to the housewares store investing in an online store, whereas investing in hardware for your business is similar to purchasing real estate. 

Different Strategies to Scale Your Business

There are a few different ways you can scale your business, whether you decide to maintain your own servers, switch to the cloud entirely, or use both. 

Horizontal Scaling

Upgrading your IT infrastructure to support your growth is a tried and true method that requires financial investment and the space to house the hardware securely. To accommodate additional data processing, demands on your network, and increased information storage, you can add more servers to your network, either by purchasing more hardware or renting server space. This type of expansion is called horizontal scaling. 

Vertical Scaling

An alternative to adding more hardware is to switch to cloud-based services. Cloud services provide ample room for growth for any business. Using the cloud helps provide additional resources to facilitate new users, more clients, and other apps and software. 

Diagonal Scaling

Implementing a combination of additional hardware and cloud computing capacity is called diagonal scaling. If you’re not sure which solution will support your business, an IT Service Provider can help you create a plan. 

Cloud Services in Edmonton, Alberta

At Alt-Tech Inc., we offer secure cloud services for businesses, firms, and agencies, so you can grow your business with confidence and maintain a high delivery standard. We also offer IT support and complete IT managed services. If you have questions about the cloud and how it can help your business grow, contact our cloud service experts. We’re happy to answer all questions about tech and cybersecurity.