It's finally time for YOUR small business to move to The Cloud

I’ve never liked “The Cloud”.  Don’t get me wrong – storing your data offsite definitely has its place; I just don’t like calling it “The Cloud”.  I like calling it “storing your data offsite” because people know what that means.

I’ve been hearing about The Cloud for as long as I can remember.  It’s been credited with solving just about every IT-related problem known to man:  data loss, energy costs, access anywhere/anytime, equipment costs, maintenance costs, you name it.  Basically The Cloud does all the things that a good Technology Solutions company like ClickAway does.  In fact, I think I am supposed to be afraid of it.

I’m not.  Why?  Because our customers don't care about buzzwords.  They want solutions to their problems, not bragging rights on the coolest IT infrastructure on the block.  Believe it or not, convincing an SMB to uproot its entire business and move it to a data center that it knows nothing about or will ever see is a task that meets with some resistance.  Then when you tell them that everything they do is going to have to go through their DSL line…you get the picture.

The “move-to-the-cloud” landscape is an ever-changing animal though.  The Cloud has made sense for some applications for ages and we’ve all been using it since we set up our first email account.  Every email you receive comes from an email server out there somewhere.  This blog post doesn’t actually live at ClickAway; it lives on a web server in Utah.  I don’t know what brand, I don’t know how fast it is, and I didn’t buy it.  I don’t need to.  So we've all be in The Cloud in some ways for while now, but it’s not just web and email that are falling into the crosshairs of sensibility.  As bandwidth goes up in capacity and down in cost, more and more important information can be stored offsite without impacting productivity.

ClickAway now builds (and runs on) Business Management Systems that are entirely web-based.  We just finished moving a law firm’s Microsoft Exchange server to The Cloud on ClickAway Hosted Exchange.  It took only about three hours and when we were done, most people didn’t notice anything had changed.  For a small monthly hosting cost, this business no longer has to worry about supporting two expensive servers, backup power, data backups, and the like – they can focus on being productive.

Next week we’ll be moving a different small business to The Cloud in another way:  their phones.  No more expensive phone servers to buy and support, no more four-figure phone bills to swallow, and they’ll be able to reach their co-workers in New York just by dialing a 3-digit extension.

I think The Cloud has finally come of age for the rest of us.  By partnering with ClickAway you can have the best kind of Technology Infrastructure there is – the kind that gets out of your way and lets you focus on running your business.

Call us @ 800-960-9030.  We always answer our (cloud-based) phones.

Oliver Rowen

Vice President of Operations