Many small businesses that I work with are pretty new when it comes to cloud computing and are wondering what is it all about? Is it suitable for my business? Am I missing out on something? I'm going to talk about three key areas that I feel are highly valuable to the small business owner.
- Backup
- Email
- Collaboration
Backup:
I consider myself an evangelizer of backups. If you don't have two backups in different physical locations, that's a problem. The easiest way is to sign up for an offsite backup service. There are many out there and they vary greatly in price and features, but in the long run can be an inexpensive failsafe to your primary backup system. To borrow the words of Woody from Toy Story: "An Offiste Backup. If you don't have one. Get One!"
Email:
Email isn't as cut and dried as offsite backup. How much you invest into your email system greatly depends on the size and scope of your business. Much may also depend on the nature of your business and whether industry or governmental regulations have to be adhered to. I wont' go into those issues but look at a more generic overview of Email services.If you have a Microsoft Exchange server in house, you will want to look into at the very least an mail bagging and spam filtering service. This will shield your internal Exchange server from outside threats and filter most unwanted mail, thus saving CPU utilization and resources from your server. It will also provide capture of emails while your server is offline for scheduled maintenance or in the event of an outage. There are also services out there that are tailored to extending and providing redundancy to your own in house email. These can provide you with very robust remote capabilities and also provide email archiving for a more complete approach to your disaster recovery plan.
Collaboration:
Collaboration and cloud services are a natural fit. Sharing files, documents and project collaboration can be accomplished cheaply and effectively. Web services that allow you to host online meetings, share your screen and work on documents together. There are many types of cloud based services out there. Taking advantage of cloud services in your business can provide data protection, ease of access to data or email, and the ability to collaborate with employees or partners from anywhere over the web.
