This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
Managing your business in the cloud is appealing for many reasons ? it gives you flexibility to access information from various devices, no matter where you are, plus, it keeps remote employees up to date and involved in brainstorms. No longer is the time when a computer crash or losing a phone meant your business lost valuable contacts or data.
But most importantly, cloud information is there when you need it. In a world where technology is accelerating the way business is done, having your company's latest stats on demand can enable faster decisions and enable you to spot and respond to a potential crisis more quickly.
Software is increasingly is built for the cloud. From accounting to team meetings to customer relationship management, most tasks can be done through a smartphone app or a browser, with an account you're signed into, so you can access this information wherever you are.
Because customer interactions are happening online, these tools can help track and optimize those relationships.
"Every business has a web presence," says Melinda Emerson, president of MFE Consulting. Whether business takes place online or not matters little. She sees some service businesses ? personal trainers, nail salons, cleaning services ? operating almost exclusively from a smartphone.
Other tasks, including human resources, sales pipelines, document sharing and employee collaboration are becoming more and more popular in various web applications. Sharing a Dropbox folder is much easier than emailing lots of files, and a project management app such as Asana allows the entire team to see how all the pieces in a workflow come together.
Dan Norris is an entrepreneur who worked with small businesses for many years to help them use their information more effectively.
?More and more business owners are running with a cloud-based platform like Xero. Same goes for a lot of other tools," he says, mentioning CRMs and project management tools.
It's not just ecommerce businesses shifting to using the cloud. Ilana Eberson, founder and CEO of B3 Global, notes that while tech and marketing companies are early adopters, all small businesses and startups can make good use of these programs. "Cloud services are so much cheaper and more within their bootstrapped budgets," she says.
But, logging in to all these services separately can be a time suck, and involves bookmarking sites and remembering a lot of passwords. Norris recently released his tool, Informly, to the public, after various versions of it had been popular with his own clients.
The app aims to pull the data from various services and put it in a single dashboard so small business owners can easily see trends and make decisions faster. Right now Informly can access data from 15 services, including Mailchimp, Quickbooks, Xero and Google Analytics, and based on feedback from beta users, he is working on adding 30-40 more.
?It helps by getting a high level view of everything in your business so you can choose to dedicate your limited time to the places that need the most attention,? Norris says.
What cloud-based programs does your business use? Tell us in the comments.
More Small Business Resources From OPEN Forum
- How to Use Hashtags to Promote Your Small Business
- 10 Things You Didn't Know About Yelp
- How to Master Social Media Like a Famous Comedian
Images courtesy of Flickr, yourdon, Informly
Source: http://mashable.com/2013/02/01/cloud-small-business/
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