52% of SMBs using the cloud say cloud services enable them to add new products and services quickly and securely on professional hosting platforms.

This statistic comes out of a recent Microsoft survey conducted via Comscore for companies that deploy between 100 and 250 personal computers in-house. The broad conclusions drawn by Microsoft and Comscore conclude that small businesses may actually obtain greater security levels by moving to a remote cloud than attempting to lock-down security using legacy IT onsite.

There is also strong evidence that SMBs my spend less time managing security since adopting the cloud which translates into greater savings and allows a company to scale back staff and focus on revenue generating activities.

“Over the past three years, SMBS that use cloud services are five times more likely to have decreased the amount of budget devoted to managing security, compared with SMBs not using the cloud,” said the Microsoft Survey.

Further they are nearly six times more likely to have reduced their total security spend in the past three years, compared with SMBs who continue with legacy IT.

This also translates into greater transparency, giving SMBs more confidence in cloud security generally, as they pursue application development or consume collaboration software pertaining to email and remotely hosted intranets.

67% of SMBs that do not use the cloud say industry standards would give them a greater confidence in cloud security going forward.

A company called SkyWire was able to save $90,000 in IT spend by transitioning to a cloud based security system. What makes this move so telling, is that their business model is heavily involved in rich mobile application development which is a considered a massive growth industry along with the cloud. Mobile and Cloud today are transforming the IT landscape and allowing small companies to leverage new ways to make money and cut costs.

“By simplifying software distribution and streamlining the security upgrade process, Windows Intune helped SkyWire save $90,000 (U.S.) in IT costs over a span of six months, a savings of $15,000 (U.S.) per month. By retiring third-party antivirus and antimalware tools, the company was able to redeploy the cost of overseeing these processes,” said Microsoft.

Small businesses can leverage over three different levels of Cloud hosting plans on Westhost platforms. Slice and dice space, bandwidth, CPU, or RAM on secure cloud platforms that offer a broad range of additional features and options to grow your online business or website.