True Business- real life for small businesses

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned my foolhardy decision to move office. I have, of course, opened up a can of worms, but it’s all part of the process of running a business.

I do, however, have to do some serious thinking, and as well as embarking on a world tour of what were described as offices but actually belong to some Dickensian dreamscape, the practicalities of an office move are now very much uppermost in my mind.

I last moved office five years ago, and one of the big changes since then is the simplicity of storing documents online. As a bit of a control-freak, I have always been a touch skeptical about online backup services and the like, but it turns out that my fears are very much unfounded. The current breed of online repositories come with cast-iron service level agreements, and plenty of functionality. I’m starting to think that online is absolutely the way to go.

The thing is, I’m not worried about losing my data in the office move. It’s more that it only takes one small detail to go wrong (like the broadband being scheduled for a month’s time) and we can’t work in the new office. Yet by bunging everything online, I- and everyone else- can work from home, a coffee bar, in fact anywhere.

And it’s not just backups that are on offer. I can upload my entire customer database to an online CRM service. I can store documents. A good friend of mine is evangelising about her document storage service, which now holds all her old paper accounts as electronic pictures.

If hosted services still sound a bit like “magick” (particularly in the “poof- and it’s gone” vein of magic), then ask yourself how much of your stuff is already actually held on online servers. Got a website? It’s hosted somewhere. Hotmail or GMail? Also hosted. Facebook? MySpace? All your data on someone else’s computer. Instant Messenger in one of its many forms? Your whole contact list is safely stored in a bunker somewhere.

As someone who’s just spent quite a bit of money fixing my own local storage inadequacies (see earlier posts), I think I’m about to become a big advocate of hosted solutions: a.k.a. paying something small each month to have all the hassle of security, backup and 24/7 availability on someone else’s shoulders: someone considerably better at it than me.