The Cloud and Capital
Cloud Hosting flexibility can ignite a startup – sole proprietor or otherwise – from the ground up. Sole proprietors, especially, aren’t often able to establish a business-oriented workspace. Depending on the industry, capital to start a venture can be limited.
This was my position, when I moved to the Northwest in 2011 to awaken a friend’s stagnant business. In 2012, I temporarily handled operations and finances: working primarily on engaging my supplier, and – through E3 attendance – gain additional suppliers. It was through the latter I realized the importance of capital: I simply didn’t have enough to grow our small accessories operation.
Workspace and Workflows in Retrospect, and Hosting
I also learned the need to vigilantly and accurately track capital. Doing this – I realized – requires a firm workspace foundation. My friend’s laptop and my desktop PC formed the computing infrastructure. Looking back, it wasn’t ideally integrated: my desktop didn’t play the role it could have. Even when working on his laptop, there was weak correspondence between what we individually did.
How could cloud hosting improve this in 2011? Linking up with a hosting provider, even then, would have provided the following:
- A centralized workspace where we can access and work on the same data – whether on my desktop or his laptop.
- Industry-standard applications. We’d use QuickBooks to centralize our expense, revenue, and inventory tracking.
- Agility to work anywhere, anytime – potentially freeing us from the office space’s necessity.
Of the points above, the most important is the agility. We moved to our respective, but divergent, destinations – in the fall of 2011. We could have maintained operations with cloud-hosted centralization. The distance made correspondence difficult, but not insurmountable. To add, we had built up different work/life patterns; cloud hosting would have helped this. This is magnified by the state by state move my friend had to endure – in 2012 or 2013.
Life was what it was for me, at the time. By then, I had given reins back to my friend; and, to this day, I’m not sure it’s operating. All we needed to keep going were
- Reliable Internet service
- Our existing computers, which weren’t going to be required to be state-of-the-art.
- Available time to work on the business through the cloud, with our busy schedules in mind.
Impediment Reduction via Cloud Computing Development
Fast-forwarding to 2018, starting small is no longer an impediment to growth. Without the need to expend time and finances to research and obtain a traditional desktop PC or laptop, entrepreneurs can access professional computing environments from any internet-enabled smartphone or tablet. Being freed from such expenditures, more immediate business needs can be met: product, infrastructure, or personnel.
