You may have heard the term Cloud Computing (also called ‘Software-as-a-Service’ or ‘Software on Demand’) and it’s a great way to improve your computing processes and save you time and hassle in your business.
If you’ve ever used web mail for your business you’ve already worked in the cloud. Cloud computing is simply software that is web-based and not computer based. You access it through a web browser and need no other software or hardware to access the full range of functionality of the program.
In my opinion, the company that has led the way on this is Salesforce, a Customer Relationship Management program (or CRM); essentially a customer database.
Before the advent of cloud computing, your customer database would be living on a computer or server in your office. To access it, you would need to be within your network or on that individual computer. You’d have to back it up and regularly upgrade the software that it ran on.
With cloud computing you can now access your database from any web browser with an internet connection.
The advantages of working in the cloud are:
- You don’t need to worry about backing up your information;
- You don’t need to upgrade the software;
- You can work from anywhere; a client’s office, an internet cafe, via an iPhone or web browser enabled mobile;
- As users collaborate on the same data, there are no version control issues. This is great for company files with accounting.
At zfweb, we work almost entirely in the cloud. This means that if our office burnt down tomorrow, we could theoretically decamp to the nearest internet cafe and carry on.
You can now undertake a large range of your business processes in the cloud:
- Accounting (we use Saasu);
- Email, Calendar, word processing, powerpoint and spreadsheets via google docs;
- Task and project management (Wrike is my favourite);
- Customer relationship management (Salesforce or Business Catalyst/Good Barry)
and a whole lot more. I’ve even seen beauty salon management software that was entirely web based. Think how useful that would be if you had more than one salon.
A lot of the more professional level software (such as video or image editing) still needs to reside on a computer or server. But there are already image manipulation features in web-based software so it’s only a matter of time before these too make the transition into the clouds.
