It’s okay. No, really. It’s okay to be nervous of the cloud. After all, have you been there? Seen it? Touched it? I haven’t! So yeah, the idea of the cloud can be a little disconcerting, especially if you are old enough to remember when 500 megabytes was an acceptable size for a desktop PC’s hard drive.
The cloud is a relatively new development for business computing. The general idea has been around since the 1970s, but the cloud didn’t become widespread until the very late 2000s. And it’s still gaining acceptance.
Why should you trust your company’s documentation to something with a nebulous-sounding name and no home address? And what exactly do we mean by company documentation?
Read on.
Basically, business documentation means a written record of how you run your business. Being in IT, I automatically think of documentation in a technical sense: the steps you’ve taken to write some software or maybe a program's user guide. But there’s a wider definition of documentation. Business documentation can be broken down into these general categories:
That’s a lot of information. Imagine how you would feel if it went missing — say, in a tragic hard-drive failure. This leads us neatly to our next question:
While the idea of storing things in the cloud doesn’t cause me panic, the idea of losing everything stored on my hard drive does. That’s why I’d recommend at least backing up your company documentation to the cloud, even if you don’t want it to live there. Here’s what you can gain from storing such information on someone else’s mega-servers:
Whether you use it as your company documentation’s permanent home or as a failsafe backup plan, storing important information in the cloud comes with some great benefits. As always, you can discuss your needs with Techsperts — we’re always here to help!