Henry Ford once said, “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”   Before the introduction of chunky spaghetti sauce — a preference of 1/3 of Americans — no one would have thought to ask for chunky spaghetti sauce on their noodles.  Before the buzz about cloud, small business owners did not consider asking for a scalable, usage-based IT infrastructure.  But once they experience the benefits, going back to tape for storage and managing in-house servers doesn’t make sense.  Now that you know what is possible, the next step is choosing the cloud migration path that is right for your business.

Choice is important: Businesses are not all built with the same infrastructure needs.  And like any innovation, the race to meet everyone’s needs produces a plethora of cloud providers with countless features and functionality to choose from.  This vast amount of choice can create an environment of paralysis.

Imagine a college kid away from home for the first time, at the grocery store planning the first meal they will make as an independent.  Spaghetti.  That’s easy.  Unbeknownst to that aspiring intellectual, aisle four has 36 varieties of spaghetti sauce to choose from.  And that is before the pasta choices.  Should the hungry student just decide to skip dinner and avoid learning how to cook spaghetti?  Do you avoid experiencing cloud because of choice paralysis?

Of course, the “right” answer is “No!”  To help get your business over this paralysis, I have come up with 3 benefits your business may realize by prioritizing a migration plan to cloud – why a faster horse will not do:

1. Stress Management

Keep track of your business wherever you may be.  The cloud helps keep your sales force mobile and engaged with the office.  Business owners can walk out to get a sandwich for lunch and continue to be connected to business activity.  Cloud collaboration tools keep mobile and remote employees engaged relieving the stress of the unknown.

2. Clutter Freedom

Clutter weighs us all down. Whether it is the mess on our desk at work making it harder to find a pen or too many knick knacks crowding the picture of the kids being cute, clutter gets in the way of efficiency.  Taking the bulkiness and the responsibility of equipment off the premise lightens the physical burden as well as the management burden.

3. Environmental Friendliness

With cloud, the usage from multiple companies is consolidated to central points that maximize efficiencies and reduce the carbon footprint.  It helps your business by driving efficiency and in turn helps the environment by conserving resources.

Cloud might not be the magic wand that makes every business challenge vaporize, but it will help put your business on a more efficient path with benefits beyond the bottom line.

If you have already moved to cloud, what have you experienced that will keep you from going back?