POSTS TAGGED : cloud computing

Cloud Support Services Work To A CEO’s Advantage

Your chief information officer (CIO) may be in the loop about the latest cloud support services and offerings, but how about the company’s CEO? What many don’t realize is that technology consultants often recommend that business leaders who choose to place their data in the cloud, or use cloud-based applications, allow third parties to manage it.

cloud support services

In addition to giving you the ability to improve vendor relationships, cloud support services can help streamline service management, support company growth and give your IT employees the opportunity to focus on revenue-related projects.

Additional advantages of cloud support services include:

A focus on business outcomes.…

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Cloud Questions That Your CEO Will Ask

One of the first things a young lawyer learns is “Never ask a question in the courtroom that you don’t already know the answer.”

Now put yourself in the conference room with your CEO. Topic of discussion: The Cloud. You’re boss will be taking the opposite approach of a lawyer; they’ll be asking you a lot of questions that they don’t know the answer to.

questions about cloud computing

Will you be prepared to answer all of your boss’s questions about how cloud services can help his company? It won’t take much to get up to speed especially if you use the following questions and answers as your guide:

1.…

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Keeping Cloud Computing Costs in Check

keeping cloud computing costs down

The cloud is a boon for companies with small budgets and small (or no) IT staff. It is seen as a way to keep costs in check.

But as so often happens with budgets, there are expenditures that you plan for, and then there are the costs that  seem to appear out of nowhere.

The cloud, of course, is not immune to cost overruns. According to Carl Fransen with CTECH in Calgary, Alberta, cloud-related costs seem to be nice at the start  but can add up after a while.  “Many cloud services charge extra for exceeded bandwidth, extra processor power, etc.,”…

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The Clean and Simple Cloud Computing Primer for Small Businesses

Nobody likes paying for things they don’t use. From finishing a restaurant meal when you’re already full, to calculating just the number of minutes you’ll need on your phone plan, we hate to hand over our money for nothing.

In a traditional office environment, business owners are forced to estimate how much server space they’ll need as they grow, investing in expensive hardware to store company data. That’s all changed in just a few years.

cloud computing for your small business

Once the sole domain of large-scale corporations, cloud computing is now infinitely accessible to even the smallest of businesses. Do you utilize web-based email services like Gmail?…

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Cloud Computing: Keep Your Feet on the Ground or Reach for the Sky?

Apple has recently announced the launch of its own bet for the cloud computing platform, iCloud. It seems that cloud computing is being looked into not only by business owners but consumers as well. Today, it doesn’t matter whether you have a 4GB USB flash drive or an external hard drive. Those gadgets may become obsolete like the floppy disks we used back in the day.

As a consumer, I might not be completely sold on being in the cloud although there are many benefits such as photo storage, video storage, etc.   None of us want to lose those precious memories, right?  …

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Mobile Technology Is Changing The Way We Do Business

Technology has certainly changed the way we do things, the way we run our business. We are all constantly on-the-go and instead of doing just one thing at a time, we can now do everything (well, almost everything) at the touch of a button.

mobile technology changing how we do business

In a recent  Business Journals study, it is found that small businesses are increasingly relying more on technology, especially the internet, as a critical business tool. Business owners can be addicted to running the business, if you think about it.

According to the same study, 55% of SMB owners are online to be connected to their businesses.…

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Cloud Computing and Your Small Business

cloud computingIn a constantly changing technological world, small businesses try to keep up with the hype by getting on the innovation band wagon. One such innovation is cloud computing. Designed to remotely host software, servers and data storage, it promises to reduce operational expenses and lower the cost of energy bills.

This of course is beneficial to those who have limited budget and limited knowledge of technology infrastructures such as small business owners. Yet, a cloud hosting survey reveals that more than half of SMB respondents have no intention of using this trend. And the reason for this is that small business owners are not well informed of what cloud computing is and what its benefits are.…

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The “Secret” Customer Service Weapon for Small Technology Companies

customer service telephone communicationsTechnology companies are, unfortunately, almost as well known for having poor customer service as they are for their actual products.   Why is that?

Small business expert Anita Campbell cited poor customer service for web apps as one of three key issues that needs to be overcome before cloud apps can become ubiquitous in small businesses.   Shame on us web software companies for allowing an easy-to-fix item like this onto the list!

This truth stings quite sharply, for a couple of reasons:

1.           It’s true

2.           Most cloud app companies are small companies (not large ones)

Crappy customer service is almost expected from large companies – in software, and beyond.  …

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Simplifying IT Management for SMBs

remote cloud computingIn smaller organizations, IT management can be a real challenge. Technology changes rapidly and qualified staff might not always be on-hand to maintain mission-critical systems, support users and administer the network.

This is complicated by the fact that, given no other convenient option, users will often come up with their own “duct tape” solutions to common information management problems. This can quickly snowball into messy situation where critical business information is randomly scattered across spreadsheets, email attachments, Word documents and sticky notes.

It’s disorganized information and inefficient business processes like these that can often wind up costing companies a lot of money further down the road.…

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