By Larry Alton
Frequently touted as the future of business technology, cloud computing's biggest benefit is that it makes enterprise-quality technology affordable for small businesses. It lets them compete at previously unattainable levels. In fact, it's now possible to completely run your small business in the cloud.
However, not everyone is on board with this idea. For every person extolling the benefits of cloud computing, there's an opponent with an equally powerful risk or disadvantage. With so many differing opinions, how can you possibly decide what to do? Let's take a look at the major pros and cons of cloud computing.
Cloud Computing: 3 Pros
1. Improved Disaster Recovery
Moving your business data to the cloud can make disaster recovery (DR)—i.e., retrieving data in the event of a hardware compromise—easier and less expensive. You can even set up your system to back up data automatically to ensure you'll be able to recover the most up-to-date information in case of emergency.
As reported in Small Business Disaster Recovery in the Cloud:
According to a study by SpiceWorks, and sponsored by Carbonite, 45 percent of SMBs have experienced data loss and, on average, it cost $9,000 to recover the data. You can minimize this cost by having a good DR plan in place before disaster strikes.
"Most SMBs aren't storing petabytes of data, and they need only a reasonable amount of reliability," says Brian Geisel, CEO of Geisel Software. "The [high] cost really comes in around how quickly your data can be recovered. For most situations, you can setup DR that will recover within a couple of hours for less than $1,000."
No matter how you do the math, $1,000 in disaster preparation is a lot cheaper than $9,000 to recover after an event.
2. Increased Collaboration and Flexibility
For many businesses, moving to the cloud increases opportunities for collaboration between employees. Colleagues can sync and work on documents or shared apps with ease, often simultaneously, receiving updates in real time.
Additionally, cloud computing allows each team member to work from anywhere. The cloud centralizes your data, which means that you, your employees, and even your clients can access your company data from any location with Internet access.
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