Where is your cloud?
Everybody is talking about the cloud. Google Docs, Zoho, Microsoft Office Small Business, and the list goes on. The world it seems is moving to the central storage model where your data is stored on a server somewhere on the interweb and you access whenever, wherever you need it. That is, as long as the tubes don’t break.
I love the cloud concept, but you should review your data requirements before jumping into the cloud. Things to consider:
How long can I go without my data? (for when the clouds are not available)
Does the service allow for local syncing? (so I can get access to some of my data even without the cloud)
How stable is the cloud provider? (will they still exit in in 2 years when cloud providers are commodities)
How do I get my data out if I want to move to another cloud? (am I locked into this one provider)
We use several clouds in our business. We have our email hosted via our Hosted Exchange provider, our CRM system is Autotask, our accounting system is Quickbooks run via VMWare in our office that is available via LogMeIn to both our internal staff and our external accounting folks. So, we have opted for both a local and remote cloud. We decided that we wanted the full functionality of Quickbooks (not the watered down Quickbooks Online), but, we wanted the covenience of being able to access it whenever and wherever we needed it, and to share it with our external financial folks.
Think about how and who you want to access your data and use that to drive your cloud migration…
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