Punching Above Your Weight With Cloud Computing

From “An Insider’s Guide to Cloud Computing”

A great thing about cloud computing is that it allows once insignificant and undercapitalized businesses to punch above their weight, which also relates to democratization—this time as computing power. Almost any business can leverage advanced computing systems that were once too costly for the “little guys” to leverage. They could not afford hardware and software that cost millions, so they had to make do with suboptimal solutions. That gave most big competitors a huge advantage over new and/or smaller competitors in their markets, and the big guys often pushed the little guys out of the race altogether.

Those race days ended with the evolution of cloud computing over the last 20 years, especially with the rise of SaaS in the early 2000s that allowed ERP and CRM systems to be leveraged as-a-service. This evolved into the rise of IaaS clouds which allowed businesses to leverage expensive storage and compute systems without a single investment needed in data centers or the hardware that lives in data centers. I saw this play out firsthand in my tenure as CTO and CEO of various startups over the years.

I had to raise at least $1 million of funding just to get the bare minimum infrastructure in place needed to develop and market the resulting technology products. Of course, that was just for entry-level startup activities. There were also upgrade and expansion cycles that drained most of my startup cash. At the time, there was no working around that startup scenario.

Today, the five powers of cloud computing make a true difference in how we do business now versus how we did business just a short time ago (see Figure 11-4). These powers break down as follows:

• Growth is the ability to scale cloud computing technology up and down as needed, now and into the future. There are few or no restrictions as to how fast you can grow, albeit you’ll pay for all that you leverage.

• Usage is usage-based cost, in that you’ll pay only for what you leverage. As you scale the business and your revenue grows, you’ll use more compute and storage resources, and pay more for using a greater amount of those services. This lines up with how we want to run our businesses, where costs track with usage, which tracks with revenue.

• Agility is the ability to change when you need to change and do so at the speed of need. It doesn’t matter if you’re moving from a relational database to an object-based database for better analytics support or moving applications to serverless computing. With cloud computing, you can adjust as needed to respond faster to market changes or move fast when you need to quickly push a new product into the market based on a rising opportunity. Look at companies that pivoted during the pandemic from manufacturing dresses or safety helmets to making masks and face shields as demand for those products far outpaced supply during the pandemic. Or the designer clothing manufacturers that sped new designer masks to market to meet exploding demand.

• Disembodied means we can use cloud-based resources at any time, for any reason, from anywhere. There is no physical requirement that people or systems be at a specific location,

  as we covered earlier in this chapter. Entire companies that use cloud computing can be
  100 percent virtual, which means they can adjust quickly and burn less cash because they don’t have to rent office or data center space. Talent should also be easier to find since the virtual business can employ anyone from anywhere.

• Democratization empowers employees, departments, and other areas of the business to directly participate in system development, deployment, and operations.