Cloud adoption rates have been growing steadily over the last couple of years, however this growth has mostly been focused around certain sectors and was usually noticeable in larger businesses.

A report published in 2012 by KPMG projected significant increases in the GDP that would stem from an increased rate of adoption of cloud services by businesses of different profiles. Australian government recently came out with a set of guides supposed to not only illustrate the benefits of cloud adoption to small business owners, but also to clarify any confusion around security, legal restrictions and cloud computing myths in general.

The Incentive

The mentioned report projects an increase in annual GDP amounting to amazing $3 billion. However, this wouldn’t happen in less than 10 years and it would require a 75% adoption rate. If adoption levels were only 50%, the increase would be somewhere in the area of $2 billion. Considering these numbers, it is no wonder that government is doing its best to incentivise small business owners to examine their cloud adoption potential and needs, and make the transfer as soon as possible.

Some of the sectors that have had the best adoption rates until now include telecommunications, media information, education, business, property and financial services, but other businesses have been turning their eyes towards cloud solutions as well.

Benefits

The set of guides published in May is supposed to acquaint the business owners with the potential behind adopting cloud solutions and the process of making the transfer. Among other, some of the benefits the SMEs could reap include significantly lower start-up costs, increase in productivity, increased scalability, flexibility and improved reliability.

Naturally, not all businesses are suited for this kind of remodelling, which is why the guides are focused on explaining which businesses could profit from the transfer and how.

Security

Security has been a hot topic ever since the first mass used cloud systems were introduced. Business owners worry both about losing their data and about someone else gaining access to it. While there certainly have been some security issues, even with the largest and most reliable providers of cloud solutions, most of the current attitude on cloud security is based on paranoia and half-truths.

If it’s intrusion you are worried about, you should know that as long as you are storing data online, even on your private servers, it is vulnerable to intrusion. Entrusting it to a cloud solutions provider doesn’t make it any less secure, as a matter of fact, with all the worries about security and the attention that these issues are getting, you can be fairly certain that the reputable providers are doing their best to offer the highest possible level of protection.

If it is unreliability that you are worried about, once again your data might be significantly better off in a remote storage than on your servers. For one, cloud solutions come with different redundancies meant to ensure that even if one of the servers holding your data becomes unresponsive, the data will still be available to you from another server.  On the other hand, if your local server goes down, you are pretty much left out in the cold.

How to Proceed

Seeing that the government is vested into bringing cloud solutions closer to small businesses, you should carefully examine their guides, and see if they are offering other kinds of incentive. Even if you don’t find anything else, you should carefully consider the possibility of adopting some of the offered solutions, as long as you determine that they make sense for your business.