Too Small for Cloud Computing?

I was at a meeting with a prospective client a couple of days ago. It was a lunch meeting at the Big Sky Cafe in San Luis Obispo... The food and service were great, in case you're wondering.

The prospective client mentioned something that gave me pause. She had attended a seminar on Cloud Computing (are you tired of that buzzword yet? Here's a link defining it). She was abuzz with the possibilities for her business... Until one of the vendors at said seminar told her that her company was "too small for cloud computing".

To be fair, the prospective client is a one-person show. She is a marketing consultant, and even her clients tend to be fairly small businesses. In fact, over 80% of the businesses in our area are 9 employees or less. We are small business. She does help her husband with his business - you guessed it, another small business. Perhaps the person who made this comment has a product aimed at a larger business - but if that is the case, they cannot speak for cloud computing as a whole when telling a prospective client that they are "too small for cloud computing". If anything, many of the technologies are in place to empower small and micro businesses to do bigger and better things.

Let's take a look at some cloud computing offerings for small and micro businesses. I've broken them into some basic categories with links. This isn't anywhere near an exhaustive list - it's intended only to give you enough to dip your toe in. There's plenty of cloud based apps out there to completely immerse yourself, should you choose.

Email - Arguably the first cloud computing application, and still the one that makes the most sense. Why should you be tethered to a specific computer in order to check your email? Why shouldn't you be able to check it from any web browser anywhere? Here's the good news - almost all email providers also provide you with the web-based equivalent just for that convenience. GMail, Yahoo, Microsoft Live, to name just a few.

Document creation, reading - This is the next big need - the ability to read that 25 page document from your web-enabled phone while not watching the way your cabbie is risking public safety. Google Apps, Zoho, HyperOffice all provide this service - for varying costs. Keep in mind, if you're more than a single person shop, you'll want to take advantage of collaboration tools.

Sharing documents - A basic collaboration need, especially if your workforce is somewhat distributed. Dropbox provides 2GB of space to share for free; $10 per month gets you 50GB. That is an awful lot of documents.

Backups - If all of your documents aren't already in the cloud by now, maybe it's time to look at backup solutions. Carbonite provides a very good service at a very reasonable price. Alternately, you can check out Mozy or IDrive.

Accounting - Check out Quickbooks Online. We use it, and it's got everything we need. If your needs are a little more specialized (like say, construction contractors) something like Intacct may be a better solution for you.

Phones / Fax - Check out Skype for your phones - you can set your own phone number. Alternately, check out Google Voice. For faxes, eFax is still the standard for online fax machines.

Hopefully this small list will have done two things. First, I hope it has convinced you that there is no such thing as "too small" for cloud computing. Second, I hope that some of the resources here have helped you to rethink the way you want to do business. If nothing else, it's a healthy process to check out new technologies.

If you need help with any of this... don't hesitate to ask.