UK Start-Ups Boosted By Cloud

Everyone is talking about how cloud computing can bring significant benefits to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

It allows even organisations with limited resources to store critical data or leverage considerable computing power without purchasing additional software and hardware.

Cloud computing not only reduces overhead costs but also allows SMBs to focus their resources on areas that need them most rather than worry about technology and infrastructure.

There is no doubt that the start-up community has received a huge boost from cloud computing. While cloud computing delivers many benefits for enterprises, you can multiply these benefits by ten-fold for start-ups. Cloud delivers levels of flexibility, scalability and compute power at attractive economic models that simply were not available without humungous IT budgets in the not too distant past.

While iland’s cloud services customers span across SMB and enterprise organisations, I particularly like the stories about start-up customers, as they reinforce the ability of cloud hosting to empower businesses in all sorts of ways. Take All Things Code, a start-up B2B creative software development organisation with ambitious growth plans. By hosting key compute and database infrastructure in the iland public cloud (IaaS) environment, it is able to achieve the focus on customers and innovation it needs to achieve growth.

Like many start-ups, All Things Code is experiencing the benefits of cloud computing in specific, business boosting ways including:

• Access to best in class infrastructure with levels of availability and security that would be out of reach for an on-premise investment
• The ability to scale compute resources up and down on demand – while capacity requirements are difficult for any business to predict, this is particularly challenging for start-ups
• The flexibility to develop and test new apps quickly and ‘fail fast’, then try new ideas on the way to innovation breakthroughs
• The ability to focus on the business, not on IT – with limited resources and often limited time to prove the business model, this is a key benefit for start-ups

For All Things Code, the strong partnership that iland has with VMware was also an important factor in its choice. The company wanted a cloud provider that could deliver the familiar VMware infrastructure it was using combined with the cloud agility it needed to grow fast.

“We have some big growth plans. We have a few products ready to go into production so being able to configure those very quickly is key for us. The flexibility and scalability of our cloud resources allows us to do that.” Dan Harding, Director at All Things Code

With ongoing innovation in cloud computing coupled with intuitive tools for cloud visibility and management like the iland ECS Portal, cloud computing is definitely providing a major boost for start-up growth in the market today.

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With SMB’s making up 49.8 per cent of the UK economy, this is definitely helping to fuel further growth and prosperity for the country.

Monica Brink, director product marketing, iland