What Impact Do Cloud Services Have on Small Businesses?

Storing your files on a local hard drive alone is fast becoming a thing of the past. An estimated 85% of businesses worldwide are making use of cloud storage. It may be time for your company to pick one of the best cloud storage services available and join the cloud. Some people still have reservations and questions about small business cloud solutions, such as: how secure will the files be? How costly is the process? Many of these concerns are unfounded, however, and cloud services should be a priority for any small business. For small businesses, there are many benefits to using cloud storage: it enables you to access your files wherever you are, you can manage whom they’re shared with, and multiple users can edit them. Contrary to the concerns that many people have, it’s also a secure, safe, and cost-efficient option.

Why is Cloud Services Best for Small Businesses?

•    Anywhere access: With many people now working from home, businesses are less focused around one central office. It would be impractical for every employee to have a hard drive containing all the company’s files. With the business’s documents on a cloud server, you and your employees can access them from anywhere, which makes remote working much easier.

•    Usability of interfaces: Some people are concerned that cloud storage systems may be complicated to use compared to the simple task of storing files on a computer’s hard drive. However, most popular cloud storage services are well designed to make it easy and intuitive to get started.

•    File-sharing options: Besides giving multiple users access to all your files, many cloud storage providers make it possible to set different privacy levels on different folders and files, so you can precisely manage who can access what. This is usually a simple matter of selecting a file or folder in your cloud service app and clicking on an option to adjust the privacy settings.

•    Multi-user collaboration: With local hard-drive-based file storage, having two users open a file at the same time can cause serious problems. Either the system simply won’t allow it, or the users risk overwriting each other’s changes. But with cloud storage, it’s possible for multiple users to not only see but also edit the same file in real-time, even if they’re in different parts of the world. This can be useful in many situations, such as when multiple people need to work together to write a report or when a company’s entire sales team needs to modify a spreadsheet to log their clients. Most services keep track of who has made what changes.

•    Time-saving synchronization: One thing that can slow down your work processes when using hard-drive-based storage is the time taken to copy files over to the device that you need them on. With cloud storage solutions, you can synchronize your files across devices, which significantly reduces such delays.