{"id":16723,"date":"2015-08-19T23:24:27","date_gmt":"2015-08-19T23:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cloudcomputing-news.net\/news\/2015\/aug\/20\/how-all-things-codes-move-cloud-aligns-key-smb-trends\/"},"modified":"2015-08-19T23:24:27","modified_gmt":"2015-08-19T23:24:27","slug":"how-all-things-codes-move-to-the-cloud-aligns-with-key-smb-trends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/how-all-things-codes-move-to-the-cloud-aligns-with-key-smb-trends\/","title":{"rendered":"How All Things Code\u2019s move to the cloud aligns with key SMB trends"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>(c)iStock.com\/jgareri<\/em><\/p>\n<p>More and more small businesses are moving to the cloud. According to a recent survey from BT Business and the British Chambers of Commerce, cloud usage among UK SMBs has grown by 15% year on year to 69%, while more than half of respondents cite cloud computing as crucial in driving business flexibility.<\/p>\n<p>Take app development house All Things Code. The Northamptonshire-based firm, in business less than two years and with only six employees, has deployed iland&rsquo;s Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) to host its applications and become &lsquo;the backbone of its IT infrastructure&rsquo;.<\/p>\n<p>The startup moved over to ECS approximately six months ago and Dan Harding, co-founder and director of All Things Code, argues the importance of cloud solutions not just for his business but others in the same boat. He tells <em>CloudTech<\/em>: &ldquo;I think all of these cloud-based systems [have] given a startup business enterprise facilities at sensible prices, so we&rsquo;d get a huge leg up with regards to not having to wait five years before we can buy the real kit and the proper software systems.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>iland was chosen by All Things Code not just because of its credibility in the market, but also because of their links to the familiar infrastructure of VMware from a previous business. &ldquo;The actual deployment process, and actually being able to spin up and manage the servers as well&#8230;was definitely a tick box for us,&rdquo; Harding explains. &ldquo;It was on a platform I knew from a higher business perspective.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>He adds: &ldquo;We may be able to talk tech and we know the industry, but as far as physically deploying and being experts in the nitty-gritty technical and deployment side of it is not our area of expertise, so we&rsquo;d always felt that when we had a question or we were out of our depth&#8230;a quick question to the team there gave us the confidence to top up our lack of skill sets in that technical area.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Regular readers of <em>CloudTech<\/em> may remember Houston-based iland from a survey they conducted in June <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cloudcomputing-news.net\/news\/2015\/jun\/30\/cloud-providers-arent-sharing-their-metadata-and-it-leads-bad-trust-customers\/\">where customers felt they weren&rsquo;t being properly treated by their providers<\/a>. One statistic which stood out like a sore thumb was the 45% of respondents who agreed with the statement &lsquo;if I were a bigger customer, my cloud provider would care more about my success.&rsquo;<\/p>\n<p>Lilac Schoenbeck, VP product marketing and product management, notes: &ldquo;We actually strive to work with [SMBs] a great deal. The nice thing is that it really pushes us to think through a lot of elements of the platform that otherwise are easy to perhaps ignore as a company.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not like a smaller company has resources to commit one or two people to full-time cloud management,&rdquo; she adds. &ldquo;They need to be able to manage their system very seamlessly, very quickly, without any hurdles associated with usability, interpreting information the system&rsquo;s telling them, and so forth.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>For Harding, the fact iland visited the site in Northamptonshire, sat the team round a table and &lsquo;held our hand through it&rsquo; was a boon. He explains: &ldquo;Being just a year old and our customers we&rsquo;ve worked really hard to get on board, it was a big deal for us even though it was probably&rdquo; &ndash; he pauses &ndash; &ldquo;it isn&rsquo;t probably, it was definitely not a big deal to iland, the size of the project.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Schoenback adds: &ldquo;As an organisation we don&rsquo;t think &lsquo;how big is that customer&rsquo;s bill every month?&rsquo; and funnel them into a different support queue. If we&rsquo;re invested in the growth of our customers and that ultimately shall drive the growth of their cloud footprint, then we shouldn&rsquo;t be caring about how much they&rsquo;re paying at the end of every month &ndash; we try and treat everybody equally.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Overall, moving to a cloud-based system was an easy decision for Harding for multiple reasons. &ldquo;I think it really gives us a bit of a leg up with regards to credibility,&rdquo; he explains. &ldquo;If we were to go and buy the same amount of hardware and have it ourselves, it would have been out of our price range, and we just haven&rsquo;t got the facilities to have it securely and well cooled.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;I think if anything it gave us an element of enterprise level backup with regards to what we could push and who we could push our services to.&rdquo;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(c)iStock.com\/jgareri<br \/>\nMore and more small businesses are moving to the cloud. According to a recent survey from BT Business and the British Chambers of Commerce, cloud usage among UK SMBs has grown by 15% year on year to 69%, while more than half of re&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16723"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16727,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16723\/revisions\/16727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}