Dipping Your Toe Into The Cloud

Not ready to move your whole small business into the cloud? Well, neither am I.

But, I find myself starting to use little, cloud-based applications that make conducting business easier instead of harder.

For example, I’m testing out a new password manager called LastPass. Instead of keeping all my passwords in a desktop solution that requires me to copy and paste them into my browser, LastPass keeps an encrypted password manager in the cloud. You can access it from any browser on any computer for free and they have a premium service that includes smartphones.

Plus, they just recently acquired Xmarks which does the same thing for bookmarks, synchronizing them across browsers, computers and (again, for a small price) smartphones.

I’m already using Amazon S3 to stream video and I’m exploring Google Apps.

For those of you with limited personal or business data you should explore using the web for offsite backups.

For years I’ve had everything on one desktop computer that I control. Now, as things are starting to get spread out over different browsers and computers I am finding it easier to use the web to synchronize my data.

So, while you don’t have to dive right in, it’s worth sticking your to into the water and see what cloud can do for your business.