Cloud Computing Solutions for Speeding-up the Small-and Medium Sized Enterprise (SME’s) Businesses in China

Abstract

China has experienced rapid digitalization in the last decade. Cloud computing makes possible for different users to access data resources from any geographical location through the Internet. This new paradigm has the ability to benefit businesses by offering low-cost, flexible, and customizable solutions that provide companies significant competitive advantages in the strongly competitive business environment on long-term timescale. It can be essential for all business, but it is especially indispensable for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME’s) to make prosperity in today’s accelerating social, economic and technological changes. In recent years, the SME’s have allocated more budget to invest in implementing digitization and databased decision making processes as they have become more aware of the importance of technological development and managing information on boosting their competitiveness in values creation activities. However, they are restricted by the size of the business. Transformation of information construction and digitization process is still in its infant stage as a consequence of a shortage in experts and available resources. This situation has gradually changed with the advent of cloud computing technology. By leveraging cloud computing technology, SME’s could completely support the digital transformation process in an efficient and effective manner. Nevertheless, for those business organisations who make efforts for application of any cloud computing solution in their business processes, they have to face with some serious emerging questions. Whether the business deployed on the cloud provided by service providers has sufficient system robustness, and whether the data stored in the cloud has sufficient security. This review paper is aiming to provide comprehensive, relevant landscape about the different cloud computing solutions (Infrastructre as a Service -IaaS) Platform as a Service -PaaS; Software as a Service -SaaS) and services models (public, private and hybrid cloud). Besides that this study focuses on which cloud service model should SME’s choose and how Chinese SME businesses should take into account their own informational structure in the age of digital transformation improving businesses performance while minimizing operational expenses and risks at the same time