Important Things a Start-up Needs to Know About Cloud Based Services

So, you’ve decided to take a courageous step and start your own company. Congratulations! There’s nothing more rewarding (both financially and personally) than being your own boss. That is if you’re good at it. And being good at running your business means adopting the latest and most efficient technological solutions. It might be stressful at first, since you won’t have the same resources as large corporations. However, there’s one very useful IT solution big businesses implement, which is totally affordable and available to any small start-up – cloud technology.

Moving business operations like document storage and email to a cloud can reduce the expenses or hardware maintenance, provide a safe backup for your data and speed up your workflow. Using the cloud can also improve collaboration between employees, giving them a 24/7 access to key information and allowing exchanging of files and remote work. But perhaps the biggest benefit you’ll experience is the ability to concentrate on your primary operations and let the cloud based services for business handle the common IT issues such as backup, security, maintenance and support.

But with the constant expansion of cloud based services for business, choosing one can be overwhelming. That’s why you need to do plenty of research and ask a lot of questions. First and foremost, you need to be concerned about security. After all, you’ll be storing your company’s critical data in the cloud so you need to be able to trust your cloud provider’s approach to security. Good cloud providers will take all the necessary measures including firewalls, anti-virus detection, multifactor user authentication, and, most importantly, complete data encryption and regular security audits.

Since your provider can in certain cases have access to your company’s critical information, it’s also important to ask whether they perform complete employee background checks. You wouldn’t want to have potential cybercriminals or identity thieves near your data. You should also make sure the location of the servers where your data will be stored is safe as well. A couple of servers in a shed can be easily accessed and compromised, so make sure this isn’t the case. In regard to this, ask whether your potential cloud based service has its data centre protected and insured in case of natural disasters, and will it compensate any potential data losses.

Finally, you’d want to be dealing with a cloud based service for business which provides 24/7 customer support. They should be available to you online or on the phone at all times, every day, including weekends and holidays. Disaster can strike at any time and putting a hold on operations due to IT issues will result in reduced productivity and revenue loss.