Cloud Services

A wide variety of cloud services, or Software as a Service (SaaS), are available on the web. In addition to commercial offerings, many of these services are offered on freeware, freemium, or trial software basis.

Cloud services offer important advantages over in-house, hosted applications and technologies. The more important business advantages include:

• Faster access to innovation which drives higher productivity
• Users adopt new functionality with less disruption
• Employees can be productive from anywhere
• Facilitate remote (virtual) team collaboration
• Improved business continuity and data security (off-site data backup)
• Reduces work and data redundancy and information "silos"
• Improves system scalability, reliability, and uptime
• Cost effective - levers the provider's economies of scale

There are a large number of cloud service options for each of your business process or functional requirements. A small sampling of the many available cloud services include:

Google Apps: A package of cloud-based services including email, calendar, office suite, and website portal. Free for ten users or $60 per month for unlimited users.

Winweb: A variety of separately priced cloud-based services for small business.

Dropbox: A free cloud-based automatic file synchronization service (2GB) that lets users share and store files online. Expandable to 50 or 100GB for $9.99 or $19.99 per month respectively.

Egnyte: A cloud-based service providing 150GB of file storage, access and backup service ($25/month).

Outright: A free cloud-based application for record keeping and accounting.

QuickBooks Online: A cloud-based service providing basic bookkeeping ($12.95 per month) and more advanced accounting functions ($26.94 per month).

Salesforce: A cloud-based contact management ($2/month) or sales and marketing ($15/month) service.

Skype: A free voice (VOIP) and video calling service.

Basecamp: A cloud-based project management service. Free for one project, upgradable to 35 or more projects ($49/month).

CloudHQ: A cloud-based synchronization service to synchronize data between different cloud services ($4.90 per month).

More specialized cloud services are available from companies such as Amazon web services, Rackspace, and Softlayer.

Divinitus can assist you in assessing whether cloud services are a good fit for your business and, if so, provide any requisite implementation and training support.