The Cloud for Small Businesses
4 Reasons to set-up a Digital Infrastructure
One decade ago the cloud became a big business with XaaS, but not many companies update their IT infrastructure at the time, being popular with just tech-related companies in general.
There are many reasons why big corporations didn’t buy into the trend: resources, “strategy”, etc. However, with the current crisis and the improvements and increase of the cloud offering, many industries have transitioned to these solutions, and in some cases, it has even proved as a competitive advantage.
2020 accelerated the transition, and many changes needed to be done even by small business owners, who have discovered how easy is to build and scale with tech help, but having an Instagram account and a Facebook shop is just the tip of the iceberg, there is more juicy stuff for your business out there that you might like to try out now to stay in shape in the future.
Data Storage
If you collect the analytics from social media sites and also have a local database, there is a chance you might lose access to that info at some point, is not to scare you but disasters and mistakes happen, then it’s important to have a backup elsewhere, and for you to save some buckets, instead of renting a place and buying new metals, an easy to set-up cloud storage is a nice solution, from Drive or Dropbox to GCP Cloud Storage and AWS S3, or even Cloud SQL or AWS Lake Formation; there are as many options as your needs and resources allow.
Not convinced? Then for you to become a futurist like the Techno King Elon Musk, having updated central storages’ for information gives you more accessibility and flexibility on your data. Instead of relying upon manual labor to look for individual statistics in Shopify; being able to know how and why your latest Pinterest board got you more in-store customers without double-checking on tons of analytic web-pages individually sounds way better.
This leads us to the need of establishing a data pipeline (automated and constantly providing data from different places in a systematic fashion to your specified storage centers). It isn’t difficult to do, just some clicks at a clouds’ platform following a guide or tutorial they already have in their respective pages.
Data Analytics
The holy grail for data experts, analytics, easier said than done. Your quality of information might determine the majority of your results. Having just some Excel dashboards from the stats you got on Instagram and Twitter isn’t enough. If you have followed me till this step, you should be sitting on a constant inflow of new data from all your sources, and with the architecture and deployment, you already meet the requirements to perform a successful analysis.
There’s no need to be an experienced mathematician to know about the basic statistics (average, max, min…), the core is which data you choose to perform the job, and there’s no one who better understands the context and meaning of that info than you. Once you scale the system it must require some technician solely working on this, but to begin just some assistance is necessary. Pick some KPIs, look at some tutorials, and stick to it until you achieve what you wanted or determined that those metrics were trash and start again.
Security
Each year more and more security risks are born. Windows Defender suffices for your personal computer, but when talking about bank accounts and credit cards is important to keep more than a safeguard. Let us be realistic, even big techs and governments suffer from security breaches, but adding extra layers as a warranty, will keep your mind and your lawyers happier in case something bad happens.
Now, with the implementation it would be better to ask for professionals’ help, as an owner what you and your team should do is have a set of good practices when using your devices, there are tons of recommendations from experts that depending on your infrastructure are the best fit for the case.
APIs & Beyond
Lastly, it is common for cloud platforms to let you access a marketplace of additional software that might or not be developed by them. Here, you could find some juicy software that won’t solve your life but might help you boost the outcomes of the investment. Each day the possible connection between apps increases, from Content Management to Machine Learning, there’s an unaccountable list of possibilities once you have a good system up and running.
Following the respective recommendations for each step might lead you to reduce the cost of installments, upgrades, and expansions, that’s why even if you don’t have now an explicit need of caring about what I’ve written here, you should keep improving your business with tech, that’s the raison d’être of those tools. Like some time ago the thought of managing an online shop scared you, and now is easy, in the future the cloud will be like having a business account on Tik Tok, sure is never late, but as the phrase goes:
El pez que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente
