Cloud Computing and a Word of Caution

I am one of those busi­ness guys who is embrac­ing Cloud Com­put­ing. I like it and see a lot of ben­e­fits to how it can make a small busi­ness more pro­duc­tive away from a phys­i­cal office. I like how I can run out to meet a client, take my lap­top, fire up my brows­er and have an iden­ti­cal appear­ance as my large desk­top com­put­er in sec­onds. I like how sav­ing and shar­ing files is made easy, and I spend less time wait­ing for things to load and save. Although the Cloud is still in its infan­tile state, is is here to stay. I believe every busi­ness should begin tak­ing babysteps to embrace the Cloud and yet still be cau­tious at the same time. Let me tell you how I use the Cloud for my busi­ness and how I remain cau­tious. What I use for my business: 

• Mac­book Air, iPhone, iPad & iMac
• Tablet PC (when I need a PC)
• Google Chrome and Fire­fox Browsers with their auto sync func­tions (Cloud)
• Google Apps for Busi­ness (email, con­tacts, cal­en­dar & docs) (Cloud)
• A copy of Microsoft Word and Excel on my hard­drive although doc­u­ments are saved online)
• Pho­to­shop (again, copies saved online & backed up)
• Drop­box for files shar­ing and online stor­age. (Cloud)
• Fresh­books (Cloud)
• Google Voice
• High­rise and Base­camp for CRM & Project Man­age­ment from 37 sig­nals (Cloud)
• Exter­nal Harddrive*

The last item I men­tioned is the key: *an exter­nal hard­drive. It is pret­ty safe to say that Cloud stor­age and usage is safe, espe­cial­ly if it is a well known and trust­ed com­pa­ny like Drop­box. How­ev­er, Cloud Com­put­ing still requires a phys­i­cal loca­tion some­where. This means that although our data is being back­up ​“in the clouds” it is being backed up some­where off­site, to a large serv­er some­where in the world. The rea­son this is a good thing is that your phys­i­cal com­put­ers are not being data hogs and will gen­er­al­ly run and oper­ate at a high­er per­for­mance. Also com­put­ers that run off a phys­i­cal serv­er tend to be a lit­tle slow­er. But, to be extra cau­tious with your data, finan­cial doc­u­ments, pass­words and even pic­tures, I would rec­om­mend still back­ing up these items to an exter­nal hard­drive. These hard­drives are dirt cheap now. You can buy a 350 GB hard­drive for prob­a­bly $60 – 70. Do a back­up every­day, week or month and you can then rest assured that if there ever was a prob­lem with the Cloud, God for­bid, you’d have a back­up copy. Also, if you use an online CRM pro­gram, I’d rec­om­mend doing an export of your data every so often. This is good not only if some­thing ever hap­pens but even if there is a human error. For exam­ple, if some­one in your office acci­den­tal­ly deletes a con­tact or a group of con­tacts, you can then import them back in if you are reg­u­lar­ly doing your own back­ups. So the bot­tom line, be a lit­tle cau­tious with Cloud Com­put­ing in these ear­ly stages and back­up your data reg­u­lar­ly. How has your busi­ness embraced Cloud Com­put­ing and what steps have you tak­en to pro­tect your data?