Amid soaring demand for greater operational flexibility, business agility, and cost-effectiveness, the cloud continues to become mainstream. According to Gartner, the global public cloud services market is expected to reach $214.3 billion in 2019, up from $182.4 billion in 2018. The considerable increase in demand for cloud services from the small-and-medium business segment is one of the critical drivers of cloud market expansion.
Cloud services are dramatically transforming the industry and breaking the entry barriers for small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs), startups, and individual developers by significantly reducing the IT infrastructure and operations & maintenance (O&M) costs. Adopting the Cloud-First strategy has become a priority for small businesses to build and scale their business in a hyper-competitive market.
A recent survey by Statista shows that 89 percent of the small and medium-sized business (SMB) respondents have already adopted cloud computing strategy in 2019.
Riding on cloud technology helps SMEs, startups, and individual developers to implement their ideas faster and reach global customers with minimum resources.
Let's look at the key benefits of moving your business to the cloud:
●Eliminate Capital Expenditure (CAPEX)
The most significant advantage of running your business on the cloud is the cost-efficiency of IT infrastructure. With the cloud, SMBs get lower and predictable monthly costs and gain the flexibility to reserve capacity as needed.
●Quick and Easy Set-Up
Startups and small-and-medium businesses have simple workloads and need faster setup. Moving business to the cloud decreases the onboarding time as it is easy to set up on the cloud in just a few minutes.
●Minimum Operational Expenditure (OPEX)
The operational expenses associated with a business on the cloud are minimal as you pay only for the resources you use and there is no hassle of maintaining the resources, thereby giving businesses more elasticity to scale up and down basis the changing workloads.
●Faster Delivery and Higher Productivity
Moving to the cloud helps reduce the delivery cycle and enables companies to accelerate product delivery, feature updates, and change management. Moving to the cloud enhances productivity by improving the organizational ability to deliver faster, which of course, means getting the stronghold in the competitive market.
●Business Continuity and Reliability
Backup and recovery are both very important for business continuity. Cloud enables businesses with robust disaster recovery and backup mechanisms (more reliable than traditional backup options).
According to Gartner, Alibaba Cloud has 3rd highest global cloud market share and is ranked as the number 1 cloud provider in the Asia-Pacific market. With an international network of 20 data centers, 61 availability zones, and 2,500+ CDN nodes across 200+ countries and regions, Alibaba Cloud serves more than 1 million customers worldwide.
Alibaba Cloud offers a comprehensive suite of cloud products and services, including Web hosting, data migration, storage, networking, and security for the public sector, large and small businesses, and individual developers operating in the eCommerce, financial services, retail, and other industries.
Alibaba Cloud offers a Starter Package plan for supporting SMEs, start-ups, and individual developers to start small and gradually scale as their businesses thrive. It provides discounted rates on some of Alibaba Cloud's most widely used services.
With this plan, individuals and small-and-medium enterprises can leverage the benefits of cloud computing with easy-to-use high-performance virtual machines with substantial data transfer plans at best prices starting from $2.50 per month in a few simple steps.
It is ideal for supporting numerous simple workloads through quick deployments. Depending upon the applications and different business scenarios requirements, you can select the Operating System (Linux or Windows), Data Center Region (Worldwide, China Hong Kong, or China Mainland), and different combinations of CPU (1-8 Core), Memory (512 MB-32 GB), SSD (20-500 GB), and Data Transfer (1-7 TB).
Let's take an example of how Alibaba Cloud helped a fast-growing video platform in the United States to expand globally and improve its user retention.
The video platform lets customers create and share videos, and started small with tens of thousands of users. After investing heavily in its video platform product, the user base increased significantly within just two years. But, increased business scale led to several challenges. Poor user experience due to high latency forced customers to stop using the platform, and increased competition led to a dip in its bottom line. To counter the situation, they developed aggressive expansion plans and sought out a reliable technology partner to help the company accelerate content delivery and maximize bandwidth - enabling users to access its website and application without any type of delay.
Alibaba Cloud helped the video platform build a global network with a hybrid cloud solution. Alibaba Cloud's Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) helped them create a secure and private enterprise-class interconnected network between Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) in different countries and local data centers. The solution helped the company to easily scale its business as it automatically responds to dynamic computing requirements. Alibaba Cloud's Global Acceleration (GA), a network acceleration product that speeds up the network and reduces latency to provide a seamless experience for users located across several regions helped the video platform deliver a smooth network experience by deploying acceleration nodes around the globe.
The video platform successfully expanded in its targeted regions and achieved a satisfactory increase in user retention within one year by implementing Alibaba Cloud's starter package program.
If you are planning to start your business, develop and deploy an application, or looking to expand your existing business, then Alibaba Cloud' Starter Package Program is an ideal cost-effective option to implement an agile platform for business growth.
Let's deep dive into the primary benefits of building and scaling your business with Alibaba Cloud Starter Package Program:
●Lower Prices Compared to AWS Lightsail
Starter Package Program is customized to offer an easy-to-use platform with all the required resources that small businesses and individual developers need to get started at the best. It offers higher cost-effectiveness compared to AWS Lightsail and eases the financial pressures of new beginners or small businesses planning to expand.
●Preconfigured Tools for Quick Deployment
With Starter Package Program, you get preconfigured options including Operating Systems such as Windows and Linux, and multiple productivity and collaboration tools such as Alibaba Mail, WordPress, Joomla and various development stacks including LAMP, MEAN and more to support SMBs get up and running immediately
●Managed Environments for Smooth Operations
Launching a server can be overwhelming for startups with limited technical expertise available at their disposal to manage the IT infrastructure. However, with Alibaba Cloud's automatically managed environment, you can overcome the burden of manually configuring different resources and rather focus on your core business.
●Secure and Compliant Networking
Businesses opting for the Starter Package Program can leverage the same tech that defends global businesses against 800 million attacks, 35,000 malicious IP addresses, and 20 million web attacks on a daily basis. Alibaba Cloud adheres to an array of domestic and international security and compliance standards.
●New ECS Configurations with Larger Data Transfer Plans
Starter Package Program offers 8 new Elastic Compute Service (ECS) configurations to help small businesses and developers power up their applications and support a wide range of workloads and business scenarios. SMBs can avail the following advantages of ECS:
5X Higher Computing Performance
4X Increase in Packet Handling
3X Higher Intranet Bandwidth
Local NVMe SSD Up to 240,000 IOPS
Up to 8 Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs
Big Data Processing Capability
Are you a small startup or SME with simpler workloads and quick deployment needs? Look no further than Alibaba Cloud Starter Package Program. For more information, visit https://www.alibabacloud.com/starter-packages/general
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Rezamand September 26, 2019 at 7:25 am
So Good