Cloud Computing- A Sweet Spot for Small Business

Are you an entrepreneur, a mom-and-pop outfit or a SOHO (small office/home office) and your business is growing? Do you need more sophisticated computing technology but you have limited capital and don't want or need an IT specialist on your payroll? Read on, cloud computing is much more than the latest crazy tech buzzword- it's a glimpse into the next stage of the internet's evolution with a real sweet spot for small business!

Do you have a Gmail or Hotmail account? Do you use Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, NetFlix, VuDu or Dropbox? These are all cloud applications and there are too many others to mention. Some of these cloud services have been around for awhile, but these applications may not meet all your specific business needs or have the security you require. However, there is a growing number of cloud services with attributes that may match your business needs.

Some of the key small business advantages you can realize from cloud services are: (1) the ability to scale up and down, (2) resource sharing among users, (3) the ability to access data anywhere, (4) billing in a pay-as-you-go format, and (5) professional IT help or training only if and when you need the help. These features, flexibility and low costs are what is rapidly attracting other small businesses to the cloud. In other words, the cloud can give your small business a significant advantage- you can have the technical sophistication of your largest competitors at a fraction of the cost.

Let's apply some of these advantages to a small business example. You have a small and growing photography company. You already have an existing web site design on WordPress, but you want to have your own domain name to more effectively market your business and be able to integrate cart services for customers to buy stock photos directly from you. A cloud provider can quickly transfer your existing web page to their hosting service, establish your own branded domain name, provide additional marketing tools and set-up your secure ecommerce shopping cart.

Here's another example. You own a small insurance company and want to automatically back-up billing information and other confidential customer data. You could buy an external hard drive, but that would not protect you from a physical theft or a fire. A cloud provider can provide an automatic (or manual), secure back-up remote storage location for your data at the same price (or less). Do you have a PC, a couple of laptops and a handful of mobile devices between yourself and other employees? No problem, a cloud provider can back them all up- automatically, on a schedule that you define. Need more space later? It's nothing for a cloud provider to quickly add (or remove) another Gig (or 100 Gig) of storage for you.

You already have email, but your growing interior design firm needs a shared calendar, better document management and an on-line database to make your business more productive. Your are concerned about the costs of buying and installing all the new software and you don't know if you have the time or the expertise to train your employees. Also, all of these new tools must be secure and accessible by mobile devices so that you can present your portfolio to your clients on a tablet or smartphone. Avoid many of the implementation costs and don't hire an IT specialist- talk to a cloud provider first!

Obviously, the concern most businesses have with cloud services is security. Your data is stored at an external data center with many other people’s data. However, keep in mind that your data will be separated behind a firewall from everyone else’s data. Cloud providers use standard password protection for access, but most also use 'tokens' that provide an additional layer of security. Some experts believe that the cloud may have more competitive and proprietary small business data locked away than larger companies have. If that's the case, why has there has only been a mere handful of reported cloud breaches compared to the large number of corporate and government data center breaches? It's because cloud providers have so much at stake, data protection has to be their core concern and top priority.

Focus on what's already made you successful and think about where your business has came from. What will you require from technology to take your small business to the next level? Can you afford the capital and resources to implement your own network? Maybe you're not willing to bet your livelihood on that significant investment. Now you should begin to see why there's all the ruckus about "the cloud". Take advantage of the "anywhere, anytime" availability of the cloud and have it customized so that you only pay for what you need, when you need it!

Don't let your competitors leave you behind, click here to learn more about how the cloud can take your small business to the next level!