Cloud Computing, Hosted Services, SaaS?  These are terms you are probably hearing a lot about these days. So what is all the fuss about?  These terms define a new way of implementing strategic IT solutions for small business.  It goes against historical trends of purchasing a small business server, acquiring expensive software licenses, and then paying someone to regularly maintain and update this server and software.

The cloud computing approach for small business has many benefits compared to a traditional centralized local setup.  With a local setup, all of your corporate resources are generally tied to one physical location and on one physical server.  What does this mean? Well it means that if this server goes down, if there is a flood/fire in your suite, if there is a break-in, your corporate data is lost. Even if you have an off-site backup strategy, the time to recover and be fully operational would be days. This is where hosted services can be your saviour.

By leveraging the power of the internet, you can access and store company resources in the ‘cloud’. This means that your corporate data is stored off-site in a secure location across multiple servers with multiple internet connections. It is impossible to achieve this level of physical redundancy in your own local environment and is one of the biggest advantages of provisioning a SaaS application. Another great feature of a cloud computing setup is that all you need is a web-browser to access the application. You do not need to install and configure software packages on your local computer, you just need to launch internet explorer, navigate to the appropriate page, and then login. You can do this from any computer in the world, which means you do not need to be sitting at your work computer to access corporate data. This also eliminates the need to setup expensive and cumbersome VPN & Remote Access solutions.

These are just some of the benefits of moving your IT infrastructure into the ‘cloud’. There are a lot of other features and benefits and we would be happy to talk to you about your options and how best to implement a cloud computing strategy for your small business. Contact us today to learn how SaaS, Cloud Computing, and Hosted Service can be applied to your environment.