After a decade of hearing the word hyped around the place, the cloud is now a serious place to house your IT, for small business!

Choosing the right cloud service is still a bit of a minefield. You’ve got Amazon, Google and Microsoft aggressively competing against each other for a bigger slice of the market. This fierce competition has resulted in three very diverse and competent cloud services, but its also driving the price of cloud-hosted services way down!

What does the cloud offer small business?

Put simply the cloud is just someone else’s computer! It means storing or working on files that are separate to where you are at the time, saving you the hassle of purchasing (and maintaining and securing!) the hardware to store them. But not only your files, now you can have your entire computer in the cloud!

What are the options?

Essentially there are three main options when it comes to cloud server use: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. Each offers its own unique variation of the cloud, and they aggressively compete with each other across all aspects of cloud technology, covering customer service, quality, speed, availability, usability, reliability and even pricing.

What are the costs?

Initially “renting” a computer or storage in the cloud may seem expensive compared to just purchasing your own hardware. Just like buying a car might seem cheaper than leasing it. But the initial purchase price is only one aspect of “owning” something. When you buy something technical, you then have to protect it, upgrade it, secure it, troubleshoot it, repair it, feed it electricity, house it … the list goes on! Add up all those financial risks, and suddenly cloud hosted IT may seem very attractive!

If you feel your business could save money by being “in the cloud” then get in touch today to arrange for a free, no-obligation assessment of your needs.