Why SMBs Are Considering the Cloud for BC

Considerations for Maintaining Critical Business Continuity

Even though 65 percent of small to midsize businesses (SMBs) have set up data backups on premise as part of a business continuity (BC) strategy, the time has come to consider more up-to-date options. Carbonite and IDC recently shared the results of their joint 2015 Business Continuity Study, which reveals some remarkable data on the subject.

It seems that SMBs have realized how important the cloud will be to current and future company business. Of the 700 SMBs surveyed, 81 percent are currently considering updating their BC strategies. Within the next year to two years, 72 percent of these businesses expect to boost their investments in BC technologies—which makes sense when you consider that more than 80 percent of these SMBs have had downtime in the past that cost “from $82,000 to $256,000 for a single event,” according to the report.

Mohamad Ali, Cabonite’s CEO, recently told website Talkin’ Cloud more about what SMBs need in a BC solution:

“SMBs are looking for strategies that ensure that their data and systems are protected, available and recoverable while eliminating the need for on-premise resources. While legacy business continuity solutions require on-premise hardware … modern cloud-enabled methods are friendlier to SMBs with limited resources.”

The report also revealed some budgetary allotments. Most of the SMBs said they spend around $20,000 on IT as a whole, but will ear mark about 14 percent of that money to spend on BC, which comes out to be $2,800. That’s a whole lot less than the cost of downtime, which can run about $8,220 per hour, but still not a huge budget for a business to put toward BC solutions.

Despite the lack of funds, SMBs do still seek offerings with “enterprise-grade features,” but that are less complex to use since any IT staff is already spread thin. 

As for the outlook on BC, with 78 million SMBs globally, the market should see growth to $2.1 billion by 2018. The report predicts that cloud providers will shift toward offering “economically viable, feature-rich business continuity solutions that reduce complexity and can be deployed both in hybrid and public cloud environments.” With 72 percent of SMBs saying they will invest additional funds toward BC by 2016, this provides BC service companies a huge opportunity to move into the SMB market.

Kim Mays has been editing and writing about IT since 1999. She currently tackles the topics of small to midsize business technology and introducing new tools for IT. Follow Kim on Google+ or Twitter.