What Is a Cloud First Strategy for Startups?

The cloud is a unique resource that allows startups to get their products to market faster, with higher quality at a lower cost. It is the secret sauce of today’s modern startup ecosystem and it is reshaping the way all companies do business. The advantages are many, but they require new thinking: Start-ups must architect their products from the ground up with a “Cloud First” strategy in mind.

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Moving to the Cloud Is a No Brainer

It’s a no-brainer to move to the cloud. Cloud computing is cheaper, more flexible, and more secure than traditional IT infrastructure.

Moving to the cloud provides:

• Cost savings - A typical startup spends between $600-1000 per month on hosting costs alone. Moving your site to the cloud can save you up to 75% of these costs depending on how much data storage space you need.
• Flexibility - Cloud hosting providers offer auto-scaling services that allow companies to increase or decrease server capacity as needed. This means that your business won't take a hit even if demand spikes unexpectedly because there's always enough power available from your provider's infrastructure just when it needs it most!
• Security - With security being one of the biggest concerns among businesses today, many startups are choosing not only what company but also where in which country their servers reside so they don't have any worries about information falling into wrong hands.

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Understanding the Economics of the Cloud

It’s important to understand the economics of the cloud before you commit. A cloud service is typically cheaper than setting up your own servers in-house, so it can make sense to use a public cloud provider for some applications.

Cloud computing is a utility like electricity or water; it just runs on demand without any upfront investment. Just like you pay for electricity as you use it, you pay for cloud services as you use them (or more accurately, when your application uses them). It’s also a pay-as-you-go model—you don’t have to commit to using an entire year's worth of bandwidth from day one; instead, you purchase only what you need today and add more capacity later if needed. One variation of this model is called “pay-for-what-you-use”: You buy infrastructure on demand as needed but at higher prices than if purchasing typical resources over time due to their limited availability within each region (more on this later).

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Start with a simple architecture; otherwise you will miss out on some of the most powerful benefits including scale, security, and cost.

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You need to get your architecture right from the start. You can’t over-engineer, but neither should you try to do everything at once or do it yourself. To help your startup get the best out of the Cloud... our team of certified Cloud specialists developed a tailored package of Cloud solutions for all startups and SMEs.

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Only Store What You Use

A Cloud first strategy is not just about having your code in the cloud, it's also about storing and processing data there too.

You can't afford to store all of your data on-premise as you will rapidly run out of space. Instead, you need to store only what you use. Use a storage service like Amazon S3 for static assets and a database like AWS DynamoDB for structured data.

If you have any compute-intensive tasks or need fast response times (e.g., serving web pages), then consider using a compute service like AWS Lambda or Fargate which will automatically scale up depending on demand without incurring any additional costs until required by an event trigger such as HTTP request or SMS message arriving at your message queue endpoint (e.g., Amazon SNS).

Design for Failure and Recoverability

One of the most important aspects of a cloud-first strategy is designing your application to be able to fail gracefully.

This means making sure that you can recover quickly from any failure situation, or even better, not let it happen in the first place. Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer services that help you upgrade and scale your server resources on demand. Using these services ensures that if one instance fails, another one will take over instantly with no downtime for your users.

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Only Pay for What You Use

As a startup, you want to operate on a pay-as-you-go model. This means that you only pay for what you use and use what you pay for. It's not about buying hardware or software upfront; the cloud allows startups to scale up or down their resources as needed, so they don't have to be locked into contracts that require them to overpay for resources when they're not using them at all.

This isn't like paying rent: with the cloud as your utility, there's no need to worry about making sure your servers are in good working order and properly configured when they're underutilized—the cloud handles all of this automatically!

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Cloud Managed Services for Small Businesses

The cloud is not some magic bullet for all your problems, you still need to invest in and manage your applications, but it does provide an enormous advantage that simply isn’t possible by building on-premise. The economics of the cloud are often misunderstood and companies that don’t use it correctly end up spending far more than they should. Use the power of design to keep things simple.

We can help accelerate your company's digital growth through Cloud infrastructure management solutions. Contact us today.