4 SMB Growth Strategies for Long-Term Success

1. Boost Agility and Reduce Overhead With Cloud Infrastructure

One reason SMBs can fold is because their prices can’t sustain the overhead needed to support a bigger operation.

“There's nothing worse than having your product take off and not be able to process the orders or handle the traffic,” says Ben Schreiner, head of AI and modern data strategy business development at Amazon Web Services.

Many startups today are born and grow in the cloud for this exact reason.

“The cloud allows for a growth-oriented company to invest appropriately for linearly matching their growth curve with the infrastructure that supports it,” Schreiner explains.

The cloud’s agility and flexibility make it easier to spin up servers and services and pare them back as needed. This simplifies the deployment and management of IT infrastructure. It also makes it possible to scale back based on seasonal demand.

Nevertheless, even automatic scaling requires oversight.

“The ability to see the costs and to set guardrails or alerts or budgets allows a smaller company to make sure that their cloud spend doesn't run out of control” Schreiner says. “But it is incumbent on the customer to put those guardrails and alerts in place.”

This practice, known as FinOps, requires a deliberate, well-structured approach to making decisions about cloud spending.

LEARN MORE: Master FinOps as a small to medium-sized business.

2. Implement Artificial Intelligence for Greater Efficiency

Artificial intelligence is introduced to most SMBs through familiar tools such as ChatGPT or common business suites.

AI is often, “just an extension of software features that every vendor has been trying to add to provide more value,” says Mike Gualtieri, vice president and principal analyst for Forrester Research.

SMBs can start using AI for basic productivity functions with relative ease. But getting the most out of AI requires methodical data management.

“All organizations, regardless of size, can get some benefit from AI without having to do a whole lot of work with their data,” Schreiner says. “But to truly be transformative, you have to put in the hard work with your data and get it to a place where you can trust it.”

He adds that “a modern data strategy is thinking about data like a product and making sure that people have access to it, that it's good data that it can be relied upon.”

This is especially important for businesses seeking to use AI as a value-add for their products. Tools such as Amazon SageMaker make it easy to build, train and deploy machine learning models. However, those models will only be as trustworthy and as valuable as the data that fuels them.

DIVE DEEPER: Artificial intelligence tools are helping small businesses compete on a larger scale.

3. Lean On Managed Services for Noncore Functions

For some SMBs, IT is a necessary evil. For others, it’s central to the product. Either way, there will always be certain IT functions that are necessary but not core to what the business delivers to customers.

Schreiner recommends that SMBs and startups offload these functions to managed service providers. This includes third-party companies that can assist with cloud migration and management of specific cloud vendors.

“If they don't have folks who are already trained up in AWS, there is a learning curve,” Schreiner says. “But in the interim, instead of waiting for your team to be fully certified and ready to go, system integrators and partners can help with staff augmentation.”

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Minimizing investments in peripheral infrastructure lets IT focus more on core innovation and growth and less on housekeeping.

Cybersecurity is often the most obvious candidate for SMBs to outsource. Managed security services providers tend to have greater access to expertise and resources needed to keep a fledgling business secure.

READ MORE: Managed services can help small businesses stay secure.

4. Prioritize Cybersecurity To Protect Your Business as It Grows

A data loss event or cyberattack can be a death sentence for SMBs or startups working within fine margins. The benefit of being in the cloud, Schreiner says, is that major cloud providers have a shared responsibility model.

“At AWS, we take responsibility for securing the cloud,” Schreiner says. “The customer is responsible for securing everything they put in the cloud.” At a minimum, this eliminates physical security costs and provides availability zones to offer greater redundancy of critical services.

AWS also employs features that help IT minimize risk by default. For instance, the provider makes it difficult to make an S3 bucket public.

“You have to go through several checks to make sure you understand what you're doing and that you're conscious of the risk that you're taking by opening up that storage to the public,” Schreiner says.

On the business side, implementing identity and access management controls who can access data and services in the cloud. Many cloud solution providers offer IAM solutions, but SMBs can leverage third-party, cloud-based IAM from companies such as Okta. Similarly, security service edge governs security policy and application access for cloud environments.

Simply put, cyber resilience can be achieved more cost-effectively via the cloud’s redundancies and its shared responsibility model. But businesses still need IAM, SSE and encryption to protect their data and avoid being cut down too early.

“The reality is that a cyber disruption, a breach of any kind, be it ransomware or otherwise, can be not just disruptive but fatal for some of these organizations,” Schreiner says. “They often just don't have the cash flow or the cash reserves to weather that kind of a storm.”