An article on Tech Republic says recent surveys of Information Technology departments 87% plan to accelerate their use of cloud technologies.
Cloud technologies are not just for organizations with advanced Information Technology. In fact, they may be even more important to small, medium, and Micro businesses. Cloud based service providers can be the great equalizer as well as solving some remote work requirements imposed by the COVID crisis.
Cloud technologies are not just for organizations with advanced Information Technology. In fact, they may be even more important to small, medium, and Micro businesses. Cloud based service providers can be the great equalizer as well as solving some remote work requirements imposed by the COVID crisis.
Cloud service offerings like Amazon Web Services, and Azure from Microsoft can provide temporary resources to allow projects that are simply unaffordable to some firms. They can provide permanent resources without the expense of hardware ownership. Things like power and hardware maintenance become the concern of Amazon, and Microsoft. Virtual computing resources are still resources that are manageable by your organization but they make of use of professionally run data centers and high cost of ownership is shared.
One of the easiest adoptions for a small business is Microsoft 365. 
If your company is not using Microsoft 365 already – you really need to ask why? The online Microsoft Exchange (Hosted Email) alone is enough to justify the very moderate expense. Add to this, access to the most current versions of Microsoft’s Office suite and access to most of Microsoft cloud services and collaboration tools – like Microsoft Teams. It is hard to justify not just adopting Microsoft 365.
If you are doing backups, and I am not sure one can consider themselves a real business without doing so – you should really be using cloud storage providers like Amazon’s S3, Microsoft’s Azure, or one of the other quality cloud storage providers.
My gray hair remembers the days of removable disks and taking them home at night as businesses disaster recovery from fire and theft, later this morphed into bank vaults and Iron Mountain. 
Today a hybrid cloud-based backup takes care of most disaster recovery. The tool Silicon Business Systems uses most often is MSP360 backup. MSP360 allows us to set up hybrid cloud backups or pure cloud backups. Hybrid backups have both a cloud copy of the backup and local copy. Pure cloud backups are cloud-only backups. MSP360 even allows our engineers to restore to Virtual Amazon and Microsoft Azure computer instances. Meaning, we can get you running again no matter what the circumstance of the failure.
Cloud service providers can help with marketing, accounting, telephony, pretty much everything an organization would need can be done, less expensively and without sacrificing control or security. In a lot cases, it will likely increase security and availability while reducing cost. The 87% number should be much higher, it has really become that much of a no brainer.
