Cloud Tech News

Nearly nine in 10 small to medium businesses have experienced “cost-related challenges” with backing up and recovering virtual servers, according to the latest industry report from virtualisation provider Veeam. These fiscal frustrations primarily included ongoing management costs, backups requiring too much storage and expensive licensing models, according to the report.

With the growing cloud computing market, there is potential for small businesses to take advantage of the technology in order to compete better with larger companies. Cloud computing is fantastic for SMBs because it allows you get to maintain complete control but without the expensive financial and staff costs and protects your business from downtime distress.

Parallels estimates the total global SMB IT market to be worth $1.1 trillion. Ovum is skeptical about the relevance of the total market size to hosted and cloud services but it is clear that the appetite of SMBs to consume hosted and cloud services is seeing strong growth.

On February 15, Sage announced that it was selling off Sage ACT, Sage SalesLogix, and the Sage Nonprofit Solutions product suite, as well as four other non-CRM products in Europe. Ovum sees this as further evidence of Sage's customer-focused transformation and desire to accelerate development of its core hybrid cloud and mobile applications portfolio.

The New Zealand Privacy Commissioner, Marie Shroff, has released a document discussing data and security implications for companies moving to the cloud. Even though the report looks at the relative basics of cloud computing from an enterprise perspective, the guidelines it recommends still make interesting reading.

The cloud is commonly envisaged as a utilitarian service, enabling those companies using it to experience ease of access to data in various accounts, homogenisation of such accounts and so on. This utilitarian approach has, broadly speaking, meant that some cloud services lose a certain personal element with their clients.

There are few words that sound like nails on the chalkboard to a small business owner such as "CRM". CRMs can range from basic contact managers, all the way up to a sophisticated tool for operating a business.

As 80% of private businesses involved in foreign trade are looking to upsize, the obvious solution is moving to the cloud.