Strategies: Consider keeping your business in the 'clouds'

— -- The future of your small business is in the clouds. No, I'm not talking about daydreaming about floating on a cloud (personally, I daydream about floating in a pool in Hawaii), I mean having key business functions handled somewhere out there in the Web-based clouds of cyberspace. Increasingly, in my company, we're moving business services to the clouds, and I love it.

In fact, having your business functions Web-based, rather than computer-based, can be a great boon for your small business. It can save you money and aggravation, while giving you greater functionality.

You may already have heard the term "cloud computing." If not, you will soon. Nope, it's not some geeky tech term. All it means, as applied to your business, is having computer applications — such as payroll, accounting, sales management, document sharing, data backup, even word processing — hosted on Web-based services rather than on your desktop, laptop or server computers. Other terms used for the same thing include Web-based or online services, and SaaS, or software as a service.

If you use a Web-based e-mail program (such as yahoo mail, hotmail, gmail, aol), you're already familiar with cloud-based computing, even if you've never used that term. Your e-mail is stored on the Web rather than on your own computer or office servers.

In my business, I've already moved our payroll and e-mail newsletter services to the Web. Both functions became vastly less time-consuming and easier. It used to take a few days to send a newsletter, and I needed staff who knew complicated tech programs. Now, my administrative assistant handles it all in a few hours, and the Web-based service (we use MyEmma.com) takes care of all the backend issues, including cleaning up the mailing list. Piece of cake.

Compare this to one of the computer-based, downloadable programs we bought, instead of choosing a cloud-based option. Just a year ago, we bought ACT, the leading sales management program, instead of subscribing to a Web-based program, such as Salesforce.com. We thought it would be cheaper. Buy it once, use it forever — right? Wrong. ACT was clumsy to install and manage from the start, and we needed tech help. Worse, after now upgrading our server, ACT wants me to shell out hundreds of dollars to upgrade — or it won't work. Yikes. With a Web-based solution, our costs would have been predictable, tech problems handled by them, and we could use the program with any computer.