How to Transform Your Small Business with a Multi-Cloud Approach

All cloud services are not the same. Identifying the services your enterprise needs, how they connect your business processes together, and choosing the right cloud services can deliver innovation and efficiencies to your company- all of which are paramount to your business’s continued success.

The cloud services landscape has expanded rapidly, with many service providers offering similar cloud packages. However, the saturation of the marketplace has also left the small business community with a massive choice of options but little in the way of personalized services their companies need to be able to implement right now.

Cloud services must ultimately support your business’s digital transformation journey and not create obstacles that slow this transformation or add unnecessary bloat to your costs. The ideal cloud service should be flexible while creating a level of transparency that speaks to your company’s changing needs. It should also support a great customer experience while leveraging technologies like AI and digital twins. A cloud partner that understands these drivers and can create bespoke services is essential here.

As your business builds its cloud infrastructure, it will likely use multiple cloud services. The trend is clearly for a multi-cloud approach, as companies want to create bespoke cloud infrastructures requiring flexibility from partner vendors and the ability to align cost and performance to the workload. Larger hyperscalers can offer this. However, they typically require resources and skillsets often inaccessible to SMBs.

“The next phase of IaaS growth will be driven by customer experience, digital and business outcomes and the virtual-first world,” says Sid Nag, Vice President Analyst at Gartner. “The hyperscalers firmly dominate the technology substrate of cloud computing, but the leadership of the business application layer is more fragmented. Providers are facing demands to redesign SaaS offerings for increased productivity, leveraging cloud-native capabilities, embedded AI and composability – particularly as budgets are increasingly driven and owned by business technologists. This change will ignite a wave of innovation and replacement in the cloud platform and application markets.”

Small businesses, in particular, will benefit from multi-cloud service providers offering much more than low-cost infrastructure. Scalability is essential, as this intimately connects with the innovation agility small companies seek. Hyperscalers certainly have the scale but don’t have the detailed appreciation of small business cloud needs.

According to research by IONOS, nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents stated they view digitization as very important. The focus on digitizing business processes and ensuring that all customer-facing services offer seamless interaction is at the core of all the cloud services IONOS provides. Every business is different, which is why companies can build their own cloud platform with just a few clicks.

Cost is also always a factor when a multi-cloud approach is considered. Large cloud service providers and their often complicated pricing structures are becoming less attractive to smaller enterprises. Here, the clear, transparent pricing structure that IONOS offers across its cloud services shines, purpose-built to support small business growth.

Next generation cloud services

Ivy Computer is an excellent example of a business that moved to IONOS Cloud to enable their enterprise to meet their customers’ demands for more efficiency. Many companies in the waste management space use Ivy Computer’s technology. If the industry were to grow, creating a cloud-based infrastructure would be critical.

Describing why Ivy Computer partnered with IONOS Cloud to deliver more world-class services to their customers, Nick Omodeo, Ivy Computer’s System Administrator, explained: “Our customers know they have a service that they can count on. I know many businesses are uneasy about the cloud because they think it’s a vulnerable area,” said Omodeo. “It‘s a newer area for many businesses that are old school. Using IONOS Cloud’s enterprise service, we have service-level agreements to pass on to our customers. We can say: ‘We have this level of commitment to you when partnered with IONOS Cloud.'”

The ongoing support that IONOS deliver is often cited as the core reason for partnering with IONOS. A hybrid approach to business services, workforce management and IT infrastructure needs a cloud services partner with a flexible and secure infrastructure. IONOS takes time to work with their clients to understand their pressure points and challenges. Only then can a comprehensive plan to resolve those issues be developed, including flexible, cost-effective services.

Flexibility, transparency, and simplicity

For IONOS, the trinity of flexibility, cost transparency, and simplicity drive all our services. In a multi-cloud approach, the space for choice has become overcrowded in the last few years. We’ve heard the issues smaller enterprises faced with their cloud infrastructures and developed our services as fast, reliable, agile and secure strategies small businesses can easily switch on.

Moving to a new cloud service provider can also often be time-consuming and present high anxiety levels for smaller enterprises, which we wanted to remove altogether. Creating new multi-cloud deployments and the migration of data to these new infrastructures is fast, secure, and reliable as IONOS has developed data connectors your business can use to migrate or port data with ease.

Whether your business is a start-up or is approaching your next phase of development and expansion, there is an IONOS cloud service built especially for you. And the IONOS Cloud Partner Program offers businesses enhanced features such as local expert support and services to help grow your business.

Cloud services from IONOS place data sovereignty, low cost, high performance, and sustainability at their core. If your business wants to evolve its multi-cloud infrastructure with highly personalized services built with the small business user in mind, IONOS is the partner you have been looking for.

Visit IONOS to learn more about how your company can start using next generation cloud services built for businesses like yours.