Cloud computing: How do small businesses migrate to the cloud?

For others, cloud computing immediately raises security and reliability concerns. After all, Gmail has been dubbed "Gfail" for no cause, and this popular cloud-based e-mail service has recently encountered several major outage events.

But before you think cloud computing is too much hype, listen to how three small business people feel about cloud computing:

-"We are migrating to a fully cloud-based solution (to provide e-mail, network hosting, virus protection, and more services), saving more than $4000 in upfront costs." We have also drastically reduced the cost of electricity and the costs of maintaining and upgrading the hardware. "--bottom-line Consulting, president of the company, said Bob Everett, a consulting firm of only three people, specializes in providing consulting services for small businesses."

-"As a non-it person, I found that cloud-based applications are easier to install and use than many applications based on a local computer, and I don't have to rely on the same number of IT support people for help." "The software company has only six employees," said Cristina Martin Greysman, executive vice president for business development at--vuzit Company.

-"A power surge incident nearly ruined our internal email server." If we don't recover the server, a lot of historical data and valuable information will be lost, not to mention days or weeks of work. Now we have a secure, redundant cloud e-mail system with a consistent interface that we can access anytime, anywhere, and the system makes our company stronger. "The marketing and communications company has only 10 employees," said Kevin Hart, partner and founder of the--hart-boillot company.

Admittedly, cloud computing has its drawbacks (which will be covered later), but for small businesses that want to reduce computational costs and improve efficiency in the current economic climate, they find many of the benefits of internet-based software and services increasingly appealing. In fact, small businesses with fewer than 100 employees are expected to spend as much as $2.4 billion trillion on cloud computing services in 2010, a significant increase from $1.7 billion trillion in 2009, according to Ray Boggs, vice president of SME research at IDC.

Here's what you need to know about cloud computing: What is cloud computing, what are the pros and cons, recommended service providers, and how your company migrates to cloud computing.

What does cloud computing mean?

For decades, engineers have used clouds to describe networks (such as the Internet) that are poorly understood by internal workings. As a term used to describe the real-time delivery of free services or fee-based services via the Internet, cloud computing has developed considerably.

Cloud computing can refer to software as a service, such as the salesforce.com of customer relationship management, and can refer to file storage, synchronization, backup, and other common computing, such as Dropbox, or infrastructure as a service, including Amazon's flexible computing cloud, It can be used to provide customized computing capacity over the Internet.