There’s consistent chatter about the new world of the cloud, and much of the discussion involves how a small business saves substantially and can then invest the savings elsewhere in its business.
\nFor many small businesses that have used the cloud for a few years, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the experience has largely been positive.
\nOperating servers both on-site and in the cloud is “a very effective way of reducing risk,” said Michael Harries, chief technologist at Citrix Startup Accelerator, a Silicon Valley investment firm that works specifically with software startups, according to the Journal.
\nBusiness owners should make their cloud-deployment decisions based on the “support they have available,” he said.
\nHarpaul Sambhi, chief executive of social-media recruitment firm Careerify, said running his company solely in the cloud has allowed him to focus more on business growth. Careerify allows a company to connect to its employees’ social networks in order to find candidates for jobs at that company, be it through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
\nSambhi said because an average employee has about 300 social-media contacts, he didn’t want to burden his staff of 12 with trying to maintain servers that are mining the data of hundreds of thousands of users.
\n“It’s a lot of work for us,” he said.<\/p>\n