A terabyte too tight? Small businesses, beware the cloud storage ceiling

#Dropbox, #Google 's #GSuite,  #Microsoft 's #OneDrive, and #Apple 's #iCloud each have pricing and service policies that close the door on tiny businesses. Here's why that's bad for customers and the storage providers, too.

Bizarrely enough, it's difficult to determine what constitutes a "small business" in the United States. The US Small Business Administration has a table of standards [PDF] that ranges from about 250 to over a thousand employees. On the other hand, the Affordable Care Act kicks in certain requirements for businesses with over 50 employees. So, what exactly is small?

When I researched my book, How To Save Jobs [free download], I was shocked when I discovered that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) didn't track labor statistics for about 75 percent of all companies. That's because three out of four US businesses are considered "nonemployer" businesses, meaning they don't manage a payroll.

The Census Bureau concurs that these tiny businesses aren't worthy of attention. They said (and I'm quoting from my book), "Because nonemployers account for only about 3.4 percent of business receipts, they are not included in most business statistics."

Yet, this group of businesses, when factored against America's gross domestic product, actually generate revenue in the neighborhood of $483 billion. In other words, these untracked businesses are worth billions to our economy. I call this group of businesses "tiny businesses." Not only are they getting short shrift from the US government, they're also hitting a data volume ceiling imposed by cloud storage vendors.

So who are these tiny businesses, and why should we at ZDNet care? After all, we're an enterprise-focused IT site. Enterprise is certainly more than 50 employees. The answer is simple: a lot of folks in IT are freelancers and individual contributors. They're also often the people brought in to make purchase recommendations.

I'm part of the ZDNet team, but my very small business consists of two people. Given that my tiny company makes payroll, it's probably not in the "nonemployer" category according to BLS. Even so, with two employees, I've run into the same data ceiling limits that many of you may have encountered.

In this article, we'll look at Dropbox, Google's G Suite, Microsoft's OneDrive, and Apple's iCloud. Each has pricing and service policies that, at least in some ways, close the door on tiny businesses.

To be clear, nothing any of these companies is doing is wrong. They're certainly entitled to charge what they want for their services. But given the size of the potential opportunity, along with the incredible lock-in that cloud storage creates, it would make sense for the SaaS storage companies to do everything they can to bring in a business while it's small, because the long-term upside is so huge.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/a-terabyte-too-tight-small-businesses-beware-the-cloud-storage-ceiling/