Scalability and Cloud Adoption are Two Sides of the Same Coin for Startups

Cloud adoption can be a game changer for startups that are looking to expand their businesses to newer horizons. Startups have a lot to benefit from Cloud in terms of reduced-costs, agility, scalability, and go-to-market. Furthermore, a recent Gartner report has stated that the worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow by 20.7% to total $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022. The report also mentions that infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is forecast to experience the highest end-user spending growth in 2023, followed by business-process-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and software-as-a-service.

Reports have also revealed that startups aim at increasing their investments in cloud infrastructure in the upcoming year. However, the adoption of cloud is easier said than done for startups. Various reports have suggested that a large number of small and medium businesses are yet to catch up in terms of migrating their data and applications to the cloud. A lack of know-how is a major drawback for startups when it comes to cloud implementation. Thankfully, there are experts on the matter, who can guide startups on their cloud adoption journey.

Roadmap for Cloud Adoption for Startups

Vikas Bhonsle, CEO, Crayon Software Experts, says that a lot of companies in India struggle in their initial stages of cloud adoption. “It eventually starts with what do you really want to achieve through cloud technology. What we have witnessed is there's a lot of confusion when companies just migrate one particular workload to the cloud and hope that this would be the overarching transformation strategy, which tends to become complicated and very expensive. To get the full value of cloud solutions, companies need to consider a very holistic digital transformation strategy, which involves adopting very modern security measures, standardizing, and automating the IT environment with open API models, operating in agile automated environments, and then of course looking at opportunities where they can build innovative solutions. Post that, the model that the company will adopt such as on-prem, public, hybrid, industry cloud, distributed cloud or sovereign cloud will have to be decided after an assessment of three vectors such as cost of safety, architecture and the level of security,” says Vikas.

Addressing Data Security, Scalability and Cost-effectiveness in a Cloud Solution 

Vikas is of the view that security, cost-effectiveness, and scalability all boils down to the proper adoption of cloud technology. “When businesses consider Cloud technology, some of their concerns are security, effectiveness and scalability. All of these aspects can be achieved through proper adoption, which ensures that businesses are able to manage all these properties effectively. Cloud architecture, in my view, is all about virtualization. On-prem resources have their limitations. However, virtual machines on the other hand are extremely flexible and can be scaled up or down based on the need. Also, they can be hosted on one or multiple server applications, and workloads can be moved around based on demand. Virtualization also offers a very strong data recovery and backup strategy. To add to this, as far as productivity is concerned, businesses don't have to worry about maintenance, which in turn results in higher productivity,” adds Vikas.

Being Cloud First and Cloud Secure

According to Vikas, being secure and cloud first, although complicated could be achieved by taking the following steps: 

• Address the needs of the organisation, the objectives, and the transformation strategy for the security posture.

• Store only the information that is critical for the organisation.

• Invest into backing up the data of the organisation.

• End devices security needs to be frequently updated. 

• Enable user authentication through one-time passwords or multi-factor authentication.

• Educate the workforce on reliable passwords and on updating policies that support a strong backup or recovery of data.

• Maintain event management logs so that one can proactively look at threats and diffuse them before catastrophe strikes.