THE BENEFITS OF MOVING OUR LIVES INTO THE CLOUD:
IT’S BUSINESS AND PERSONAL
By Rick Mark
Service Area Manager
The risk of losing documents, photos and files on our personal computers and business networks through viruses or hardware malfunctions has become too great and hard to manage.In a previous article, I discussed some of the easy things we can do in the Cloud to make our lives easier and put those mundane tasks, such as bill paying on autopilot. Well this month, we get a little more personal – let’s talk data soup! There are lots of things that go into data, of any kind. For instance, a simple report that an employee spends a day putting together, or how about your kid’s Basketball lineup for tomorrow’s game that you spent 2 hours putting together? I don’t know about you, but having to pay to have the employee to rebuild that report a 2nd time – if it somehow was lost or corrupted – is not the way I want my business to spend its capital. And I sure don’t have another spare couple of hours to put together that basketball lineup, but I have to so I now have to MAKE TIME where it wasn’t available before.
Wouldn’t it have been great if I could have that employee recover that document, or any variation of it, within seconds, versus hours or days? Wouldn’t it have been great if when my home computer crashed, that I could have gone to a library or friend’s house, or even my cell phone, and recovered the lost basketball schedule – in seconds? Great isn’t the word really – it’s Why? Why can’t I already do this?
Well you can! Business solutions range in many sizes and complexities depending on your individual and business needs. Also, the level of recovery will also change dependi
ng on amount of data, users, locations, etc. This isn’t a quick and simple solutio
n in many cases. For personal storage or document archiving or storage, look into DropBox, IDrive among others. IDrive for instance will save your word, excel and other documents as you write them and save them – to the Cloud.
So the above are some general and very standard solutions to common problems with data – but what about applications and their data?
Both business and personal solutions are out there and very affordable. You can host your accounting software, CRM and other integrated applications in the Cloud – and get the same recovery and redundancy benefits that you would for other Cloud services.
You can use services like Google Apps – and not have to worry about your general documents, storage, email, etc. – all you need is internet access and you are ready to go. Imagine how much money you DON’T have to spend on a computer that just needs to access the internet to be fully functional? This goes for businesses too – less money spent on servers sure, but the employee computers do not have to be powerhouses anymore either. This can save you large capital dollars.
If you would like to discuss how the cloud can better serve you or your business, please contact us:
