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Thinking About Moving to the Cloud? There Are Trade-Offs
By DAVID H. FREEDMAN

Most businesses, whether they realize it or not, already have at least a foot in the cloud. If they use Gmail, for example, they are going into the cloud to let Google’s computers handle e-mail.

In fact, most of us have been tying into Internet-based services for more than a decade. But now, more and more business-oriented tools are becoming available online, including many that can be critical to running a company. This guide looks at questions business owners ask and trade-offs they have to make.

WILL YOU ALWAYS GET ACCESS?

Sonya Weisshappel, founder of a 12-employee, home- and business-organizing company, Seriatim, in New York, moved to the cloud after deciding last year to move her offices. “We were going to be between physical spaces for days,” Ms. Weisshappel said, “and I wanted everything to be accessible to everyone.”

Until then, her computers had been running a $20,000 custom-designed database application to oversee marketing and organizing. She switched everything to Intuit’s online QuickBase database service for $200 a month. “There were a few small hiccups that were easy to fix,” she said, “and now QuickBase does even more than we could do before.”

Ms. Weisshappel is designing her own home inventory system, and she has decided that she will find a cloud-based inventory application on which to run it. She says she expects to provide better access and help her clients avoid losing their inventory when they most need it — namely, when a flood or fire destroys their computers.

The potential downside is that you can become dependent on the reliability of your Internet connection. Mr. DeGarmo, of Signature, for example, had to add a DSL connection to a cable connection, and he still occasionally has dropped calls with his cloud-based phone service. Even the most reliable cloud services fail on occasion. Amazon single-handedly brought down a chunk of the Web in April, and again more recently, when its servers, which many cloud services rely on, went down.

The bottom line: The cloud is ideal if you and your employees need access to tools and data from different computers and devices. The cloud can be a problem, though, if you do not always have fast, reliable Internet access, especially if you upload or download large files.

Full article can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/business/smallbusiness/what-to-consider-when-thinking-about-moving-to-the-cloud.html