While having in-house servers used to be standard for all flavors of businesses, more and more companies are turning to “Cloud Computing” or Software as a Service (SaaS) for their server needs. SaaS models used to be thought of as less secure and riskier than in-house servers. Now, with fully encrypted cloud options held at secure locations with redundant backups and robust networks it’s almost a no-brainer to make the switch to SaaS.
We’ve recently become Google Apps for Business resellers and we couldn’t be more excited about it! We’ve helped several businesses move from their existing mail, calendar, contacts and file sharing servers over to Google Apps and we’re in the process of making the switch ourselves.
With the low price of $5/user/month we estimate that we’ll save thousands a year between hardware and maintenance costs. Not to mention, Google’s interface heavily promotes collaboration within an organization by providing easy-to-use tools that are intuitive and interface beautifully with Apple’s Mac and iOS. On the administrative end, I’m extremely impressed with the amount of tools I have at my disposal to ensure our company’s information remains secure and well-managed.
If you’re thinking of making the switch to a SaaS system for your company’s needs, I highly encourage you to go with a trusted source, like Google. I’d also caution you to keep in mind that even with Google’s robust datacenter, it’s important to have a secondary backup of your information. Google guarantees uptime of 99.9%; that’s still not 100%. This is why we’ve also partnered with companies like Backupify. Backupify can create a secondary copy of your data and they host it on Amazon’s secure servers plus you have the option of making a local backup on your own servers.
Interested in hearing more about moving your business to Google Apps for Business? Drop us a line at consulting@smalldog.com or call us at 888.746.9816.