How the cloud can help small firms go global

A cor­ner­stone of Boris John­son’s suc­cess­ful elec­tion cam­paign was his com­mit­ment, and slo­gan, to “Get Brex­it Done”. For the 340,500 UK small and medi­um-sized enter­pris­es doing busi­ness inter­na­tion­al­ly, ques­tions remain over ongo­ing trade nego­ti­a­tions and the terms Britain will be able to agree, or not, both with the Euro­pean Union and the rest of the world.

When coro­n­avirus took hold, these ques­tions were put to one side as strug­gling small firms focused on try­ing to deal with the ham­mer blow of the pan­dem­ic. But at the same time, less­er-told sto­ries of suc­cess have begun to emerge.

Small com­pa­nies in the ecom­merce sec­tor are thriv­ing, for exam­ple. One such busi­ness is ful­fil­ment­crowd, an 85-strong ful­fil­ment out­sourc­ing com­pa­ny near Man­ches­ter, which man­ag­ing direc­tor Lee Thomp­son says has seen “two to three years of growth in two to three months” dur­ing COVID-19.

The abil­i­ty to grow at speed and adapt to increas­ing and evolv­ing cus­tomer needs is only pos­si­ble because of fulfilmentcrowd’s cloud infra­struc­ture. The deci­sion to turn off the company’s dat­a­cen­tre in 2019 and switch to a cloud-based infra­struc­ture was a piv­otal moment in the company’s suc­cess, says Thomp­son.

Switch­ing to a cloud-native mod­el has also enabled the busi­ness to slash its oper­at­ing costs, both the costs of hard­ware and main­te­nance, which amount­ed to £600,000 a year, and what Thomp­son refers to as the “unknown costs” of com­mit­ting staff to a low-val­ue task. “If I’ve got a very senior devel­op­er who’s hav­ing to upgrade a serv­er, that’s a cost which is dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly high,” he says.

How the cloud can foster rapid growth

Many oth­er busi­ness­es are also lever­ag­ing the ben­e­fits of cloud-based infra­struc­ture to help growth. New research con­duct­ed by Pub­lic First, on behalf of Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS), found com­pa­nies run­ning on the cloud are near­ly three times as like­ly to be grow­ing more than 5 per cent a year than those that are not.

Cloud use is even more preva­lent among the UK’s fastest-grow­ing com­pa­nies. Accord­ing to the Pub­lic First research, 16 of the UK’s 17 “uni­corns”, com­pa­nies that are val­ued at more than $1 bil­lion, are pow­ered by AWS. Baby­lon, a healthtech uni­corn head­quar­tered in Lon­don, which enables users to have vir­tu­al con­sul­ta­tions with doc­tors via text and video, now has more than 4.5 mil­lion reg­is­tered users world­wide.

Via the app, the patient describes their symp­toms to a vir­tu­al assis­tant that then sug­gests rel­e­vant health infor­ma­tion fol­lowed by self-care treat­ment advice or a video call with a doc­tor. Baby­lon uses arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to access 530 mil­lion knowl­edge streams, the largest knowl­edge base in pri­ma­ry care med­i­cine. The app “learns” from every inter­ac­tion it has with a patient, so its accu­ra­cy is for­ev­er improv­ing.

“We use nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing so the app can talk with patients in a friend­ly, human way,” says Dr Ali Parsa, founder and chief exec­u­tive of Baby­lon. “We take the data and infer what is like­ly wrong with the patient using prob­a­bilis­tic graph­i­cal mod­el­ling.” Baby­lon also uses pre­dic­tive ana­lyt­ics to tell the patient what will hap­pen if they fol­low a sug­gest­ed course of action.

Opening the door to international expansion

From the very out­set, Baby­lon was set for inter­na­tion­al growth and it need­ed to col­lab­o­rate with a cloud ser­vices provider that could match its glob­al ambi­tion.

“AWS was a nat­ur­al part­ner for us because of its scale,” says Parsa. “It enabled us to dis­trib­ute our servers world­wide. Imag­ine in the past, if we want­ed to grow we had to find new spaces one by one, place our own servers there one by one.”

Sarah McVit­tie, co-founder of Dres­sipi, a fash­ion pre­dic­tion plat­form which works with retail­ers includ­ing John Lewis, Top­shop and Riv­er Island, says her com­pa­ny wouldn’t be able to process its cus­tomers’ moun­tains of data and offer them action­able insights in real time with­out the elas­tic­i­ty of a cloud-based infra­struc­ture.

“Cloud has changed the speed at which we can process the data. For any one of our clients, we’re pro­cess­ing mil­lions of dat­a­points. We are pro­duc­ing 40 mil­lion out­fit sug­ges­tions a night for some of our clients. That wouldn’t be pos­si­ble and would be way too expen­sive with­out the cloud,” she says.

Shamus Rae, founder and chief exec­u­tive of EngineB, a start­up apply­ing the prin­ci­ples of open bank­ing to cor­po­rate data, says being able to lever­age microser­vices means small busi­ness­es can punch above their weight from an inno­va­tion per­spec­tive.

“It means when you’re try­ing to com­pete with larg­er organ­i­sa­tions, you don’t have to com­pete on tech­nol­o­gy spend around the stuff that isn’t a dif­fer­en­tia­tor for you,” he says. “The cloud is real­ly help­ing small com­pa­nies act big and be big where nec­es­sary. That’s a dra­mat­ic shift.”

Cloud-native busi­ness­es can also be much more fleet of foot when it comes to inter­na­tion­al expan­sion. Rae adds: “We now have projects in India, Aus­tralia and South Africa, despite putting no focus on these areas. We’ve not done any mar­ket­ing there, but the inbound inter­est has hap­pened because we’re avail­able and vis­i­ble. We couldn’t do what we’re doing with­out it being cloud based.”

Allaying concerns over security

In his for­mer role as head of inno­va­tion, dig­i­tal labour and cog­ni­tive trans­for­ma­tion at big four accoun­tan­cy firm KPMG, Rae occa­sion­al­ly encoun­tered busi­ness own­ers still grap­pling with the secu­ri­ty impli­ca­tions of not man­ag­ing their own IT infra­struc­ture, par­tic­u­lar­ly in new inter­na­tion­al mar­kets. He would be at pains to allay their con­cerns.

“There’s a per­cep­tion, but it’s not a real­i­ty. The secu­ri­ty issue and pro­tec­tion of data issue is solved. If you look at the large cloud providers, their tech­nol­o­gy around secu­ri­ty is immense,” he says. “The biggest issue in data secu­ri­ty is some­one in your office acci­den­tal­ly push­ing a but­ton on a phish­ing email. There is no issue in terms of cloud secu­ri­ty of data.”