Cloud Computing and Your Small Biz: Is It a Match Made in Heaven?

Grazed from ERP Cloud News. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing — you’ve heard of it, you may even be using it without realizing it. What is it exactly, and what potential benefits does it offer for your small business? As the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) points out, cloud computing has been around in some way, shape or form for years. Facebook, Gmail and Flickr are just three applications of the technology that many of us use daily to store comments, photos, videos and other content in the cloud. But that are many other applications, says the SBA.

“Imagine being able to log onto a website and access all the tools and programs that your employees need to do their jobs without having to invest in lots of standalone software licenses,” it notes. “What if you could access all your office productivity tools (email, calendar, word processing, databases, invoicing, CRM, intranet, etc.) from any location or device? What’s more, all the software management and trouble-shooting can be done by the cloud service provider, freeing up your IT resources.”…

Cloud computing — and cloud providers like Google, Microsoft and Oracle — make all this possible. And the technology is beginning to catch on, according to 2011 Cloud Computing Tracking Poll conducted by CDW, a provider of technology solutions. Twenty-eight percent of U.S. organizations were using cloud computing at the time of the survey, with most (73 percent) reporting that their first step into the cloud was implementation of a single cloud application. Services most commonly operated in the cloud are commodity applications such as email (50 percent of cloud users), file storage (39 percent), web and video conferencing (36 and 32 percent, respectively), and online learning (34 percent)./..

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