Availability & awareness of smart/ right blend of Technology are key pegs behind IT adoption in SMB. A decent sized SMB cannot afford to sustain downtime hassles, limitation to scale up in earlier deployed IT infra (end-to-end fresh investment for any scale up of manpower or functions), poor software functionalities yielding no advantage in process automations and restricted provision to use information on the move.
Interesting incidence of well-known company were HR department was busy making calls and fetching and updating Leaves, Tax, reimbursement etc. details manually during last week of the month to sales employees spread across nation. Observing such a sympathetic situation to see 5 member HR team literally struggling till 10 pm in night in Technology era is nothing but unfortunate. Fortunately the server (desktop used as server) crashed at 10pm when all HR employee got a chance to leave for home. The salary could not get processed on scheduled date and was delayed for 2 more days. The cloud adoption can remove such bottlenecks and assure the availability of data.
Well no failure is a loss if it leaves behind some learning’s. The company has now implemented cloud based HR portal with an Android based enterprise Apps running on handsets of all sales employees. The data is now collected on the go, without extra man effort, with no extra electricity & time wastage and moreover hassle free with almost no failure. Sales guy just have to click on leave button on App and wait for it to turn green for approval. The leave status is automatically updated in backend. The local travel is tracked from the app and actual reimbursement is automatically calculated. Moreover the pdf format of tax proofs can be directly uploaded to central DB.
Sales function, logistic tracking, HR, accounting ERP modules implemented on cloud and interfaced on mobile devises can drastically improve efficiency and help precisely estimate the ROI. Though RAS (Reliability, Availability & Scalability) features could be derived from in-house Server client deployment, Yet the ease of pay per use, pay as you go, pay as your grow can result on wise selection of cloud functionalities.
By the way who understand RAS in SMBs, and why should they, it is meant for consultants and white colored CIOs. The easy way out is off shoulders the IT management to Cloud and let SMB owner focus on his core business. Simplicity in implementation, speedy roll over, optimised investments based on pay as you use model is the key behind enterprise cloud adoption. Cloud adoption well weaved with enterprise mobility to extract the best mileage from investments hence can prove the right blend for SMB automation.
Well, easy said than done. Is the Cloud benefits well known to SMB/Es?
