This article shares a perspective on application transformation and service convergence trends observed in the small business space.
What is Multi-Cloud
The SMB is Transforming to As-a-Service Cloud Applications
Unlike Enterprise customers, the smaller businesses often have limited budgets with less room for capital expenditures to support their own Cloud application builds. Fortunately, the “as-a-Service” and Cloud Native application models leverage cloud in a way that commoditize these large capital expenses and puts them in reach for Small Businesses. These cloud applications are sold as-a-service and can be purchased and consumed on monthly subscription plans which makes them viable even for smaller companies.
SMB Convergence at the Branch
Another SMB trend is convergence at the branch level. As Cloud Applications are encompassing services like Voice, Point-of-Sale, Video Collaboration and Video Surveillance along with other mission critical systems beyond traditional SaaS, these applications begin to interact and converge. The convergence of applications with services often requires a single location to access multiple clouds from different providers, some SMB customers also require connections to the corporate network as another hybrid cloud.
SMB Needs SD-WAN
For small businesses, SD-WAN can be a Catch-All Term for Advanced Connectivity and can start with just Quality-of-service (QOS) & managed network/router service. SD-WAN is also known for the ability to failover from one provider to another and the more advanced solutions do this without dropping live voice calls, video meetings, and point-of-sale transactions continue.
Until now, SD-WAN was typically used by larger organizations to bring multiple ISP connections from diverse carriers into a unified managed network offering. If branch offices were involved, then SD-WAN provides a means to tie them into the corporate network. In the past, most Small and Medium Business (SMB), with limited budgets and compact footprints, could not afford this new converged SD-WAN technology.
Multi-Cloud & Multi-Path SD-WAN for SMB
The SD-WAN needs at the branch are evolving to include Seamless Multi-Cloud technology (Overlays) supporting SaaS applications as well as converged business voicee47e30, video, and surveillance services over internet protocols. Moving forward, the cost-effective unified transformation and convergence of all these systems is necessary to truly address the needs of the small business customer.
