You are experiencing more traffic, and your IT team is complaining that it’s becoming more difficult to allocate the resources to meet that increased demand. It’s become harder and more expensive to keep up with your data storage. You know you are at a point where you need a disaster recovery plan, but that is going to be costly for sure.

All of these are familiar issues SMEs and startups face as they begin to grow their operations. And in-house infrastructure solutions can “break the bank” for those who expect to grow larger and yet remain agile. At the same time, while small businesses have certainly heard of cloud computing, there has been a misconception that this is a solution for large businesses.

Not so. Migration to cloud services is now far more budget-friendly than you may know. And there are many other benefits that must be considered too.

Not long ago, the IDC predicted that small-to-medium-sized companies would contribute about 40% of all money spend on cloud services. Today, 90% of small to medium-sized businesses (100-499 employees) are already using cloud computing at some capacity. And much of this rising popularity of the cloud is the result of new flexible and cost-efficient services proposed by market leaders such as Amazon Web Services, with its highly flexible public cloud infrastructure.

What that flexibility means is that SMBs can begin small, with immediate needs, and then scale their cloud infrastructure as they grow, while unlocking a number of additional benefits on their way to complete cloudification.

1. You Will Eliminate Infrastructure Budget Demands

There are several AWS services that can benefit small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) looking to eliminate hardware and administrative infrastructure costs as the business grows. Some of these services include:

1. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): EC2 allows businesses to quickly provision virtual servers, providing the flexibility to scale up or down based on current loads.
2. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): S3 provides scalable and cost-effective object storage, enabling businesses to store and retrieve any amount of data at any time.
3. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS): RDS provides managed database services, simplifying database administration and lowering costs.
4. Amazon CloudFront: CloudFront is a content delivery network that accelerates the delivery of web content to users, improving the user experience and reducing costs.

By leveraging these services, businesses can eliminate the need for major hardware investments and reduce administrative costs. Additionally, by partnering with a managed IT support provider, businesses can ensure that their cloud infrastructure is efficiently managed, further reducing costs.

At Citrus Consulting, our enterprise customers have experienced significant cost savings and streamlined IT operations after migrating to AWS. As a trusted partner for AWS migration, we can help businesses make a seamless transition to the cloud, enabling them to benefit from the advantages of cloud computing while optimizing their costs.

2. Greater Flexibility with Data Storage

Migrating to AWS provides businesses with a range of services that can help them to efficiently manage and store their data while optimizing costs. AWS offers a range of storage solutions such as Amazon S3, EBS, and Glacier that are designed to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes.

With Amazon S3, businesses can store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere at any time. Amazon EBS provides block-level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances, while Amazon Glacier is designed for data archiving and long-term backup. This range of services allows businesses to choose the storage solution that best suits their needs, providing greater flexibility and scalability.

By partnering with Citrus Consulting, businesses can take advantage of our expertise in AWS storage solutions. We can help businesses to migrate their data to the cloud, ensuring that it is stored securely and efficiently. Our services include data management, data backup and recovery, and disaster recovery solutions, all of which are designed to optimize costs while providing the highest level of data protection.

In summary, AWS cloud storage eliminates the need for businesses to make significant investments in hardware, software, and staff, while providing unlimited storage capacity. By partnering with Citrus Consulting, businesses can take advantage of the full range of AWS storage solutions, enabling them to manage and store their data efficiently, while optimizing their costs.

3. Disaster Recovery No Longer an Issue

With traditional IT infrastructure, disaster recovery can be a daunting and costly challenge for businesses. In the event of a disaster, internal or external, servers can crash and cause extensive damage. In the past, businesses have had to rely on external backup systems housed in a physical location, which is not a foolproof method as hardware failures are responsible for 45% of all unplanned downtime.

By migrating to AWS, businesses can eliminate the need for expensive disaster recovery measures. AWS provides robust disaster recovery solutions that are scalable, reliable, and cost-effective. Cloud-based disaster recovery procedures can be set up quickly and easily, and most processes can run automatically, saving businesses both human and hardware resources.

AWS services such as AWS Backup, AWS Disaster Recovery, and Amazon S3 Glacier can provide businesses with flexible, secure, and cost-effective disaster recovery solutions. Citrus Consulting can assist businesses in setting up AWS disaster recovery procedures, helping them to reduce the risk of data loss and downtime while optimizing their costs. Our expertise in AWS disaster recovery ensures that businesses can leverage the best practices and technologies available, enabling them to focus on growing their business without worrying about disaster recovery costs.

4. Fewer Issues with Applications

By migrating applications to the cloud, businesses can enjoy numerous benefits, including reduced workload for their IT departments. When applications are hosted in the cloud, scaling, capacity provision, and load balancing are automatic. This eliminates the need for IT teams to manually manage and monitor applications, resulting in fewer issues and less unplanned downtime.

With AWS, businesses can leverage various services, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Elastic Load Balancing, to host and manage their applications in the cloud. EC2 provides scalable computing capacity in the cloud, while Elastic Load Balancing distributes incoming traffic across multiple EC2 instances, ensuring that applications can handle varying levels of traffic without downtime.

Citrus Consulting can help businesses make a seamless transition to AWS, providing expertise in application migration and management. Our team of experts can assist businesses in leveraging AWS services to host and manage their applications, ensuring maximum uptime and scalability while optimizing costs. With our help, businesses can focus on their core operations, while we take care of their cloud infrastructure needs.

5. Improved Security

AWS provides numerous security features and services to ensure that your infrastructure and data remain secure. By adopting AWS, you automatically benefit from the company’s extensive security expertise and best practices, which significantly reduces the burden on your in-house team. AWS allows you to automate security measures and monitor your infrastructure performance 24/7 without the need for manual intervention.

AWS offers a range of security services, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), which enables you to manage user access to your AWS resources, and Amazon GuardDuty, which provides intelligent threat detection and continuous monitoring for suspicious activity. Amazon Inspector is another useful security tool that automatically assesses applications for vulnerabilities and generates reports to help you address potential security issues.

AWS also provides encryption services, such as AWS Key Management Service (KMS), to help you secure your data and comply with regulatory requirements. AWS Firewall Manager helps you manage and enforce firewall rules across your entire infrastructure, while AWS Shield provides DDoS protection for your web applications.

In conclusion, AWS offers a wide range of security services and features that can help SMEs improve their security posture. By adopting AWS, you can automate security measures, monitor your infrastructure performance, and benefit from the company’s extensive security expertise and best practices, thus reducing the burden on your in-house team. AWS services such as AWS IAM, GuardDuty, Inspector, KMS, Firewall Manager, and Shield are all excellent options for enhancing your security.

6. Better Compliance

By migrating to AWS, businesses can benefit from improved compliance as AWS provides a secure and compliant infrastructure that meets various regulatory requirements. AWS maintains compliance with industry standards such as HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC2, among others, ensuring that businesses can easily meet their regulatory requirements. This means that businesses no longer have to bear the burden of compliance, as it is now the responsibility of the service provider.

AWS services such as AWS Artifact, AWS Audit Manager, and AWS Config can help businesses automate compliance assessments, manage their compliance documentation, and monitor their compliance posture, respectively. This streamlines compliance processes and eliminates the need for businesses to invest in additional compliance-related resources.

Citrus Consulting’s AWS compliance experts can assist businesses in assessing their compliance needs, developing a compliance strategy, and implementing and maintaining their compliance posture on the AWS platform. With our expertise in AWS compliance, businesses can ensure that they meet their regulatory requirements while focusing on their core business operations.

Here’s the thing about Amazon Web Services. It is the recognized leader among cloud service providers and is the standard by which all other providers are measured. In fact, the AWS ecosystem includes full and continually growing components that serve businesses of any size extremely well. In looking at AWS benefits, SMB’s would do well to think about the following:

AWS is here to stay. There is no volatility, and companies that choose it can be comfortable with its reliability.

Set up is relatively easy for IT departments in charge of the migration. AWS offers tutorials for every function a company may choose.

SMB’s can enjoy a relatively low initial investment and pay only for the services they use at any given time. AWS does not require a long-term stiff contract.

Businesses can easily and quickly scale, and more capacity is regularly added – to handle enterprises as big as Netflix or as small as yours.

AWS has top security, with data centers all over the planet that are monitored around the clock. And the beauty for a small business is that it gets the same security protections that Netflix does.

In short, AWS offers the flexibility, cost savings, reliability, scalability, and security that any business will appreciate. What once was considered a solution for large enterprises only, is now one for everyone.

Migration to the cloud can produce some anxiety on the part of an inexperienced IT staff. And while AWS makes it as easy as possible through its tutorials, that staff will have to take the time to move the company through the migration. This takes them away from other important business tasks.

Thus, at Citrus Consulting, we have experience of over 100+ cloud migration use cases, as Well Architected and Advanced Consulting Partner, we can help you define your cloud strategy and migration best practices.