To stay competitive in the modern world, businesses must meet the demands of their clients at the drop of a hat. Today’s consumers expect a certain level of service from a company that goes above and beyond the product’s quality. It’s no longer enough to be the best at what you do – now, you have to jump through several other hoops, as well.
This is especially true when it comes to your digital performance. As a very minimum, consumers expect you to have an attractive website that is intuitive to navigate and responsive to their demands. Failure to satisfy those base-level standards will see prospective customers turn their back on your business to seek alternatives elsewhere. People want instant gratification – and you must give it to them.
While that might sound like a daunting state of affairs, the key to achieving such a seemingly impossible challenge is scalability. Prioritising scalability in your operations is key to giving your company the breathing room it needs to grow and adapt to fluctuating market conditions, keeping your target market – and your boardroom – happy and engaged going forwards.
Why scalability matters
There are many reasons why placing scalability front and centre of your business strategy makes prudent sense. These include:
- Perhaps the biggest reason to make your business scalable is the flexibility it affords. When your operations are truly scalable, you can switch from handling 1,000 visitors to 10,000 visitors per day in the blink of an eye.
- Client satisfaction. Leading on from the point above, ensuring your site is capable of handling fluctuating amounts of traffic is paramount to keeping your audience content. Indeed, if a marketing campaign does go viral and footfall on your site multiplies overnight, you could become a victim of your own success if you’re not equipped to deal with it. Any visitor to a new site who experiences slow loading times or broken links is unlikely to return.
- Now that the world is truly connected online to create a single, global marketplace, you must stay abreast of the most exciting emerging new markets and ready your business to expand into them as and when the opportunity arises.
- If you manage your operations correctly, you’ll be able to achieve scalability without having to fork out unnecessary amounts of cash to do so. How is this possible? Through only paying for the services that you actually use and the resources you actually consume. The best way to bring affordable scalability to your business is through the cloud.
How to bring scalability to your business
Traditionally, a fledgling business would have to anticipate the demands it may face and equip itself with the resources necessary to satisfy them. This would mean estimating how many servers were needed and how much bandwidth to allocate. Playing a guessing game with these figures is a veritable minefield, since underestimating demand can lead to a poor customer experience – but overestimating it results in unused resources that merely gobble up your budget.
Thankfully, bringing scalability to your operations can alleviate the problem. By engaging cloud services from a third-party specialist and outsourcing your hardware demands to them, you can access all the servers and bandwidth you need, when you need it. This means that you never have to pay for anything that you don’t use, saving your business money and streamlining it for future success in one fell swoop.
For those reasons, migrating to the cloud makes perfect sense for any company serious about getting ahead of the competition. And that’s before all the other advantages of the cloud – remote accessibility, top-notch cybersecurity, backed up data stores, facilitated collaboration – are taken into account. If you want to incorporate scalability into your business model tomorrow, consider the cloud today.
Image by Gerd Altmann