Small businesses not getting into the cloud
A recent survey shows that small and midsize businesses are not jumping on the cloud bandwagon. Is that a fact or just a flaw in the survey design?
Hosting provider RackSpace recently published the results of a survey in which it asked 1,500 small and midsize businesses in the United States and United Kingdom what they knew about "cloud hosting" and if they intend to use it.
Not too surprisingly, the majority of SMBs were not aware nor terribly interested in "cloud hosting." I suspect that some of this had to do with the use of the term "cloud hosting" rather than an interest in moving toward hosted applications and infrastructure. I would argue that questions about using "the cloud" versus "cloud hosting" would have come up with a different set of answers.
This is a both a testament to how to design a proper survey question (semantics really matter) as well as the fact that small and midsize businesses comprise a tough market. Despite being obvious consumers for newer, cheaper solutions, they have the least resources and tend to have little time to focus on technology.
Of course, the cloud and software-as-a-service applications make perfect sense for smaller companies, but most simply don't know how to make the transition from existing systems, and they often don't see the value of making changes that interrupt their existing processes.
I wrote a detailed article about moving everything to the cloud a few months ago and stand behind it.
Via ReadWriteWeb.
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