A brilliant business often starts with an entrepreneur dreaming up a fantastic business idea. Most entrepreneurs at the beginning of their journeys are often strapped for cash, and according to a recent study, 95% of seed-stage founders thought it would either remain the same or get harder to raise money. Even access to Angel funds at the very start (idea stage) is generally uncommon.

Startups want to sprout their ideas fast, and the last thing they want is to spend their time and energy is to find the ground, dig the soil, remove the weeds before sowing the seed, and water it till the idea breathes life.

What I mean here is that it is absolutely unnecessary for the entrepreneurs (who want to surprise the customer in areas other than IT infrastructure) to learn how to evaluate and buy the server, storage, network gears, software, tools and also find/build/collocate a data centre.

Public cloud is where a startup should go (and almost every startup does) to get their IT infrastructure to jump start their development. Public cloud saves time, effort and money; all of which are high premium resources available at the entrepreneur's disposal.

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For any startup that wants to offer services on the cloud, allowing its business to be born into the cloud is important, for reasons such as accessibility, scalability and being able to correct any mistakes quickly and effectively. Investors will want to see this as part of the business model, and customers will want to experience the beta on the cloud too.

The real fun begins when a startup begins to acquire customers. Now they are live. As a startup’s customer base grows, the computational, storage and performance needs grow.

Alongside this, security needs become critical, as the IT infrastructure becomes core to the business sustenance, and just as a startup thinks it is able to manage the growth, the demand starts to climb the exponential curve and you are desperately searching for clues how to assure service excellence to your customers.

To make the ride even harder, the cloud services provider experiences an outage, and a startup has absolutely no control over it; the company is completely at the mercy of the public cloud provider. Now, the startup is trying to perform damage control instead of growing the business further and the media is becoming extremely generous by splashing the news all over.

So what can a startup business do to avoid this scenario?

Don't believe it if someone tells you that such outages are not very common. By just searching on the internet, you can see many instances of it documented – for example, Microsoft Azure’s systems experienced two outages in March, the second taking place not even 24 hours after the systems had been brought back online from the first outage that month.

Set out a long-term plan

The low initial costs of setting up infrastructure on a public cloud should not sideline a startup business. As the business grows, it will become evident that any operational time lost due to outages or performance bottlenecks will be very costly through more than just money; reputation and losing customers is also at risk.

Therefore it is important to take a long term view. It may be worth investing in strategic partnership with a cloud infrastructure and security services provider such as Happiest Minds, who take accountability on its behalf to ensure the continuous monitoring, management, optimal usage, and excellent understanding of a cloud vendor's cloud model.

Be proactive

At some point in the journey, depending on how fast the business grows and how the growth intensifies the consumption of public cloud services, there will be a situation where the services on the cloud will begin to tip in favour of setting up a virtual private cloud or even an on-premise solution.

If the enterprise is not proactive and does not switch at the right point, the subsequent decision making will be drawn out, complex and even error prone. This therefore creates a lot of expense by moving to an on-premise or private cloud.

Partner with a provider

Investing in a partnership with a strong cloud infrastructure and security services provider who is able to accommodate to the startup is an important step. As the startup grows, a partner can watch and proactively advise when to initiate what action that will save the business all the blushes.

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The partner should be on the same page as the startup, i.e. to be able to help and guide the business in the early stages of its development, firmly advise the business as the company grows, and automate many of the operations in its maturity to free up the time and resources for more transformation.

Entrepreneurs who were strapped for cash during the Startup days will have a strong and very profitable cash flow as the business successfully grows. At these transition points, a true partnership with a provider will demonstrate the symbiotic relationship that creates a win-win all the way.

As a result, visionary and well-planned startups will not have any trouble in gliding from a public cloud to virtual private cloud or even to on-premise private cloud.

Sourced from Raju Chellaton, SVP and Global Head, Cross Business Units, Happiest Minds Technologies