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In previous posts we were looking at inertia in larger organisations and how to achieve your IT objectives. Transitioning to the cloud, despite the benefits, is a daunting concept which must be passed through several stages of approval. We have discussed factors including: the big players’ belief that they have already reached economies of scale, their entrenched IT teams obfuscating the business benefits with technology speak and their fear of losing control of service levels – all as contributing to cloud inertia. What about small and medium-sized businesses? Surely they cannot argue the same?

Clearly, most SMEs cannot afford their own data centres; they don’t have thousands of servers nor big IT support teams. So, one would imagine that the resistance from entrenched internal views and job protection or because of substantial prior investment, would not occur.

The economies of scale available from transferring a small number of servers to a big dedicated provider must show a substantial reduction in cost. Likewise, a small over-stretched or even an under-utilised internal IT resource or resources will never compete with the expertise of the a large-scale cloud provider.

For this type of small to medium company, moving to the cloud is surely a no-brainer. In my opinion it is for any company, but I can understand the trepidation of the larger organisations to some extent. In a way, the whole situation is a classic example of Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, where small nimble companies innovate and try new technologies, while the old, established companies think they can cruise along using their existing systems. Look what happened to GM, when it thought it could simply rely on protectionism and acquire its way to innovation. Like the trend towards lower fuel consumption in vehicles, increasing reliance upon cloud based services is here to stay.

For small to medium sized organisations, the opportunity to take advantage of the lumbering pace of the big boys and streamline their own IT, is here.