Start up businesses have so many challenges to face that the IT often get overlooked.  this often leads to monolithic, tightly coupled or incompatible systems, that often require bespoke configuration in order to gain the functionality required. The attraction of cloud to start up businesses comes from overcoming the above with highly cohesive and loosely coupled solutions that fit scale with the business as required.
Recently there has been a huge increase in business start ups, and many of these have taken to the cloud for their IT services. Now this can be for many reasons (to name a few):

• Prohibitive Capital Cost,
• Time to Live,
• Support,
• Flexibility.

Pay as You Consume
Another compelling factor to cloud based services is their ability to scale from a single user up to multi-thousand user without major infrastructure changes, it simply becomes a licensed right. This then means that the IT services auto-scale as the requirements of the business grow, however this is true if – for any reason – the business needs to scale down. With only paying for the services consumed, cloud becomes a really compelling solution that can be easily respond to ROI requirements. Traditional IT services often require a level prediction of the future of the business – which for start-ups can be uncertain – size them wrong or choose the wrong systems, and you are faced with either an under-performing system or an over priced system.  

Integration at the Core
Many cloud based services then offer deeper integration within their own eco-system, ensuring that the dependencies between solutions are loosely coupled, thus facilitating upgrades and functionality releases. However cloud providers realised that success of their software is achieve by integration with other cloud providers. Leading online CRM systems need to easily integrate with your ERP and Messaging systems, therefore providing the ability for “plugins” and “API” to be written further enhances their own software’s capability, something that can be quite challenging when it comes to traditional services.

Rapid Development Keeping you Ahead
Leveraging the power of the cloud and DevOps to ensure your enterprise applications are performing at their best, with all the required functionality is key to the success of a start up. Any delay in released functionality could cost or impact the business considerably. with rapid development, your business can stay ahead of the curve and your competitors, at a fraction of the cost of traditional services. Cloud may not be a cheaper solution when compared side by side, but be sure to analyse the benefits of cloud over traditional. As an example: explore the costs of delivering on-premises everything Microsoft Office 365 has to offer, then calculate the cost of loosing one of these services for a day, then look at the costs of maintaining such services (with Internal IT or outsourcing). Suddenly, the cost of cloud becomes far more compelling.

As a final note, a great book to read demonstrating the values of DevOps to businesses is The Phoenix Project – trust me, you will quickly start relating the characters back to your own business. Touble comes, when – like me – you relate yourself to more than one of the characters.