It’s 4am. You’re sleeping soundly, dreaming of success when your phone starts going off with emails, texts, social media notifications and maybe even an actual phone call. No, you’re not the president of the United States, you’re just another entrepreneur who is traveling and forgot about the time difference.
As an entrepreneur, your idea of a vacation is only working 6 hours a day instead of 12, thus the interruption of your peaceful sleep is nothing new. But in this case, you’re three thousand miles away and three hours behind – why the heck did you think you could actually travel anywhere and leave your job behind?
The answer, of course, is the Cloud. Not the cumulus cloud in your dreams, but the cloud computing phenomenon to which we all have at least some dependence. Without it, you would never be able to go anywhere. As an entrepreneur, the Cloud is your office, your virtual lifeline that guarantees you won’t miss a beat of managing your business.
Cloud computing has fast become indispensable to small businesses and large corporations alike, and is making vast amounts of money faster than your download speed. Let’s be clear here, if you haven’t noticed that your wireless carrier is charging you big bucks, it’s time to fire your bookkeeper.
The amount of options for cloud computing services is growing constantly. Yet, love it or hate it, cloud computing has become the most efficient way to work remotely.
The cloud is for both business and consumers, since both use it for various reasons, including:
- Sharing, exchanging and delivering data, whether public or private (all cloud services include encryption)
- Storing and managing passwords
- Utilizing applications (Office 365, Adobe Cloud, etc.)
- Storing your files, such as photos, videos and songs
- Managing your business (CRMs), your finances – or life in general!
Recently, the Cloud enabled me to coordinate with my team and launch a client website from the left coast. All went well, and the site is up and running – a great wealth management firm, BTW! I could not have done it without DropBox, Google Drive and Roboform – all of which are cloud-based. Not to mention my trusty laptop – and in certain situations, my Android!
Of course, the cloud is far from perfect. Shortcomings include connectivity issues, outages that affect even the largest companies, and fluctuations in pricing that resemble the stock market.
But overall, the good outweighs the bad in the cloud, hence the reason why it is often virtual heaven for entrepreneurs. We just couldn’t leave home without it.
