Is It Time To Float Your Business Up Into The Cloud?

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Eric Basu.

This is the third posting in my cyber awareness series for small to medium-sized business owners. One of the biggest buzzwords being used right now is “the cloud.” So, what is the cloud? There are many different definitions you can find, but for the small business owner it means essentially outsourcing your IT infrastructure (possibly including applications, servers, data storage, etc) remotely. Why would you move to the cloud? The most commonly cited reasons are focused upon the core business and cost savings, but in reality every company should consider carefully any move to the cloud to ensure it is the correct move for them.

For small to mid-size business owners migrating some or all of their systems to the cloud environments presents the usual IT issues, but the problems are compounded by having data stored and managed remotely, by external organizations and often in multiple locations. Among these issues are special considerations for privacy, interoperability, data and application portability, data integrity, business continuity, and security…

In this posting I’m going to focus upon the security issues, technical challenges, and best practices associated with a move to the cloud. In a discussion with one of our cloud security gurus, Mike Johnsen, he highlighted some of the key issues that a business owner should be aware of and factor into the decision-making process:…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericbasu/2013/11/12/best-practices-for-cloud-implementations/