SMBs Are Floating on the Azure Cloud

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Small and medium sized businesses, or more popularly known as SMBs, have been known to be major innovators when it comes to industry trends. Is it because they possess small tight-knit teams where communication is easily accessible? Or perhaps because they manage to remain humble, so much so that larger businesses have modeled their office culture around start-up environments? Or possibly even because when SMBs utilize software like Microsoft Azure they are capable of harnessing the most appropriate tools for their smaller teams? 

Let’s examine further – SMBs obviously have different IT requirements as opposed to larger scale companies and as such, they encounter different challenges. Small businesses usually have somewhere between 1-50 employees and midsized businesses usually have somewhere between 100-999 employees. Customarily, businesses of all sizes would set up server boxes in offices and have to acquire very skilled IT professionals to install and monitor the hardware. It was a tedious process but what it came down to was that many of the solutions installed in those server boxes were not nearly as effective as an Azure solution in this case. 

Eventually, however the online version of Azure was released and massively changed the game for cloud enterprise solutions. While SharePoint is the ultimate collaboration tool and definitely pumps out optimal IT solutions for a multitude of organizations worldwide, it may be somewhat of a lackluster investment for a smaller firm. Why is this? SMBs have smaller teams and thus do not require as much facilitation by system integrators. Microsoft Azure replaces the need for those IT components as the Azure cloud outsources the complex IT requirements that those system integrators would typically have to manage. Microsoft Azure.

Now, although SharePoint is cloud-based as well, Azure is a more suitable IT solution for SMBs because it is easier to get the ball rolling. It doesn’t require as much effort to create an IT infrastructure from scratch; it’s simpler to implement and it is cost effective, which are very attractive features to smaller businesses. 

So, obviously creating and implementing IT infrastructure can become very expensive and larger corporations are very capable of making the investments necessary to ensure they use the most effective technology, however smaller companies can get more bang for their buck by investing in Azure. Azure provides organizations with a computing platform where developers can use space on Azure hosting services to create efficient web applications and cloud-based datacenter storage capabilities (as opposed to on-premises servers which can be costly to install). 

The idea here is not that SharePoint or Azure are better than the other but rather that larger corporations might benefit more from SharePoint and that smaller ones may reach more success with Azure because of it’s all encompassing set of features. So how specifically can SMBs really leverage Microsoft Azure? With Azure, businesses can easily create pre-configured SharePoint farms in no time – for small businesses that have small IT departments or those that don’t possess an IT department at all, this is perfect because they can test out the solution and really evaluate how SharePoint/Azure capabilities can enhance their workflow.

LiveTiles Cloud works on top of Azure and it massively enhances SaaS capabilities. What else? It’s incredibly easy for small businesses to implement the cloud services that Azure offers. Businesses don’t already need to possess a SharePoint practice and they only pay for the services they utilize in Azure. 

SMBs and small teams can use LiveTiles Cloud in the Azure stratosphere to create engaging digital workplaces for staff members – this extremely user-friendly and intuitive digital platform provides business users with collaboration tools to incorporate all necessary components of everyday workflow in one centralized location.