NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The proliferation of hackers, natural disasters and unstable market conditions are all significant drivers for small and medium businesses (SMBs) in the U.S. to seek backup/storage for their company’s data and email in the cloud. Pressure to reduce costs, improve flexibility, and maintain privacy of sensitive data also lures SMBs to invest in cloud storage. Furthermore, for mobile SMB employees, cloud storage is an attractive tool for backing-up and storing data while on the go. 31% of the one million U.S. SMBs using hosted storage have mobile employees. According to AMI-Partners’ recent report U.S. SMB Cloud Playbook, the market for hosted storage will increase by 11% yearly (CAGR) through 2015, to $270 million.
“Many U.S. SMBs are moving to the cloud to enhance existing packaged applications, such as CRM databases. Cloud storage provides these companies with the latest storage technology realizing a significant reduction in IT overhead due to decreased investment in physical storage devices on their premises,” says Nichelle Grannum, Survey Research Analyst at AMI.
“Hosted storage also allows companies to subscribe based on their storage capacity requirements and desired backup schedule, coupled with the benefit of a flexible payment schedule,” says Ms. Grannum. “Since companies need only to pay for the storage they actually use, hosting costs can be tightly controlled. Responsibility for storage maintenance tasks, such as backup, data replication, and storage software updates are entrusted to the service provider, allowing SMBs to focus on their core business,” Grannum continued. For cloud storage U.S. SMBs prefer private servers as opposed to public or hybrid ones.
Company data is constantly changing and growing in volume, thus moving storage to the cloud gives companies greater storage capacity and flexibility at a lower cost. With the influx of smartphones and tablets, cloud storage will become increasingly more critical in providing an easily accessible, yet secure place to backup and retrieve company data.
About the Study
AMI’s 2011 U.S. SMB Cloud Playbook – Strategic and Tactical GTM Planning Guide provides a tactical framework for architecting cloud-based services offerings to meet the growing demand for cloud services “bundles” and a perspective on cloud-related dynamics shaping up in the SMB space, including:
- Cloud-related needs among four types of SMB segments; behavioral and usage characteristics; future adoption plans
- Cloud and ICT spending, market opportunity, price sensitivity
- Service bundling preferences and demand uplift; vendor value propositions and offers/bundles
- Purchase channel mix and capabilities
For more information about this study, AMI-Partners, or our global SMB research, please call 212-944-5100, e-mail ask_ami@ami-partners.com or visit our www.ami-partners.com.
About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.
AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence — with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and “go-to-market” solutions. AMI was founded in 1996. Since its inception, the firm has built a world-class management team, each with ten to fifteen years’ experience in IT, telecom, online communications or multimedia.
AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 30 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs, Cloud services studies and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.