If you’re a large enterprise, you’re in pretty good shape for the cloud: you know what kind of security you want and need, you have security staff who can validate what you’re getting from the provider, and you can hold up your end of the deal – since it takes both customer and provider working together to build a complete security program. Most of the security providers out there are building for you, because that’s where the money is; and they’re eager to work on scaling up to meet the requirements for your big business. If you want custom security clauses in a contract, chances are, you’ll get them.

But at the other end of the scale there are the cloud customers I refer to as being “below the security poverty line.” These are the small shops (like your doctor’s medical practice) that may not have an IT staff at all. These small businesses tend to be very dependent on third party providers, and when it comes to security, they have no way to know what they need. Do they really need DLP, a web application firewall, single sign-on, log management, and all the premium security bells and whistles? Even if you gave them a free appliance or a dedicated firewall VM, they wouldn’t know what to do with it or have anyone to run it.

And when a small business has only a couple of servers in a decommissioned restroom*, the provider may be able to move them to their cloud, but it may not be able to scale a security solution down far enough to make it simple to run and cost-effective for either side. This is the great challenge today: to make cloud security both effective and affordable, both above and below 10,000 feet, no matter whether you’re flying a jumbo airliner or a Cessna.

-Wendy Nather, The 451 Group

*True story. I had to run some there.

Now, if we look outside of the silos of industry verticals, there is one type of customer that stands out more than others. That is the entrepreneurial small business. Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and the engine of economic growth, and thus I need to keep up with what is going on with things that affect small businesses.

So I ran across a study worth passing along via a blog post. It is produced by Kauffman: The Foundation of Entrepreneurship and is entitled “The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur: Family Background and Motivation.” It contains some valuable insights into some traits of the majority of our customers. These traits below are taken straight from the report:

Company founders tend to be middle-aged and well-educated, and did better in high school than in college

• The average and median age of company founders
  in our sample when they started their current
  companies was 40. (This is consistent with our
  previous research, which found the average and
  median age of technology company founders to
  be 39).
• 95.1 percent of respondents themselves had earned
  bachelor’s degrees, and 47 percent had more
  advanced degrees.

These entrepreneurs tend to come from middle-class or upper-lower-class backgrounds, and were better educated and more entrepreneurial than their parents

• 71.5 percent of respondents came from middle-class
  backgrounds (34.6 percent upper-middle class and
  36.9 percent lower-middle class). Additionally, 21.8
  percent said they came from upper-lower-class
  families (blue-collar workers in some form of
  manual labor).
• Less than 1 percent came from extremely rich or
  extremely poor backgrounds

Most entrepreneurs are married and have children

• 69.9 percent of respondents indicated they were
  married when they launched their first business. An
  additional 5.2 percent were divorced, separated, or
  widowed.
• 59.7 percent of respondents indicated they had at
  least one child when they launched their first
  business, and 43.5 percent had two or more
  children.

Early interest and propensity to start companies

• Of the 24.5 percent who indicated that they were
  “extremely interested” in becoming entrepreneurs
  during college, 47.1 percent went on to start more
  than two companies (as compared to 32.9 percent
  of the overall sample).
• The majority of the entrepreneurs in our sample
  were serial entrepreneurs. The average number of
  businesses launched by respondents was
  approximately 2.3; 41.4 percent were starting their
  first businesses.

Motivations for becoming entrepreneurs: building wealth, owning a company, startup culture, and capitalizing on a business idea

• 74.8 percent of respondents indicated desire to
  build wealth as an important motivation in
  becoming an entrepreneur. This factor was rated as
  important by 82.1 percent of respondents who
  grew up in “lower-upper-class” families.
• 68.1 percent of respondents indicated that
  capitalizing on a business idea was an important
  motivation in becoming an entrepreneur.
• 66.2 percent said the appeal of a startup culture
  was an important motivation.
• 60.3 percent said that working for others did not
  appeal to them. Responses to this question were
  relatively evenly distributed in a rough bell curve,
  with 16 percent of respondents citing this as an
  extremely important factor and 16.8 percent of
  respondents citing it as not at all a factor.

Not only do the traits above describe a big chunk of SoftLayer’s customers – they also describe the people of SoftLayer.

If you are an entrepreneurial small business and you need a hosted IT service provider who understands your needs, you will find a likeminded partner in SoftLayer. Many of the small businesses who joined with us two or three years ago aren’t so small anymore, and that’s fine! When our customers succeed, we succeed. We get that.