11 Must Have Cloud Services to Turbo Charge your Business
Are you ready to embrace the cloud? It's what everyone else is talking about? The thing is does anyone actually know what it is apart from being nice and shiny? And are any cloud services actually any good? I discuss 11 fantastic cloud services, software as a service or apps that will help your business.
#1 Office Software in the Cloud
I'm going to be sitting on the fence on this one, or rather give you three options! The choice you make in the end depends on your business. Traditionally most businesses had standalone computers connected to the internet or their own office server. Each computer would have individual copies of Office software (usually Microsoft Office) or the Office software was deployed by the server. The problem with this approach was that it required maintenance of a server, software updates, licences and you'd quite often end up being in a mess. No doubt you'll have heard that "the cloud" is the best thing ever and you should be embracing it right now. I'm always quite sceptical about such statements, but I do think now is the time for businesses to look into it. Here are 3 advantages:
- No local server to run, manage, maintain or repair
- Less reliance (if any) on an IT department
- You always have the latest version of Office (with security updates)
There are different options depending on your set up and budget. Office 365 Most of the Office 365 plans give you full versions of Office which you can run on your local desktops or laptops. Calling this a "cloud" service is stretching the definition a bit, but you do get some cloud storage to store and share your documents as well as Microsoft Exchange for your email. It's more of a subscription based service for Office with Microsoft Exchange thrown in for good measure. If you opt for Office 365, you'll still need to manage your computers and software together with security updates. That probably means you'd still need to keep someone or a team to manage your computers or to offer you support if and when things go wrong. Citrix XenApp Instead of running Microsoft Office on your computer, why not actually run it in the Cloud? With the likes of XenApp from Citrix you can run the likes of Microsoft Word, Outlook and Excel from your computer as if it is running locally- but instead it is being powered by servers at a data centre. This is not like traditional screen sharing or remote desktop- this is what is called "App virtualisation". The advantage of this is that you don't have to run any software locally on your computer. That means no worrying about software updates, security or backup- all of that is taken care of by your XenApp provider. It even continues to work if your internet connection dies. The ability or inability of cloud services to work offline is one of my big concerns with using Cloud based services- so the fact that it works is a big advantage. In order to use XenApp you need to find a Cloud based provider who offers Citrix XenApp, for example The IT Farm based in Manchester. Amazon WorkSpaces Internet retail giant Amazon have always offered a wide range of web services such as simple storage (S3) and cloud computing (EC2). Recently Amazon announced Amazon WorkSpaces which is their first venture into what they refer to as "a fully managed desktop computing service in the cloud". It is very similar to the likes of Citrix's XenApp in that it offers Office Apps virtually on your computer. The cost is also very reasonable starting at $50 per user per month (including all the software licences). I'm very interested to know more about this technology. I do have my concerns though. What will the customer support be like? Where will our data be stored? If it's the US (which is likely) then I'd be concerned about data security, particularly in the post-Snowden/NSA world.
#2 Password Management in the Cloud: LastPass
- It helps you and your team remember all your passwords
- You can share passwords for shared accounts with your team, and keep your personal ones to yourself
- Enables you to use super strong (uncrackable) passwords for all your accounts
- Saves time by filling in your login details across all your internet accounts
- With LastPass Enterprise you can use a Security Policy that your staff have to comply with- minimum length of passwords etc
- Words across all browsers and mobiles and offline
Everyone can use LastPass for free, but the paid versions aren't expensive. Premium is $12 per user per year and the Enterprise version is $24 per user per year/ That's just the start of it, but you get the idea. As you can tell I love LastPass- and no I'm not on commission- I am just a happy customer!
#3 Manage Customer Relationships in the Cloud: Nimble
- Your local address book (from Outlook, Thunderbird etc)
- Your cloud based contacts list (GMail, Apple Mail etc)
- Your Social Network contacts (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+)
- Social groups and Twitter lists
- Your newsletter service (for example MailChimp)
With these contacts you can then merge any duplicates and start tagging them so that they are easy to find later. For example I have tagged all the CEOs I know, my clients, friends, people from University, school, potential clients and more. Tagging means I can segment my contacts into different categories- making it much easier to find a group of contacts or a specific one instantly. One of the great features about Nimble is that you can see easily if your contacts are on LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter and Facebook and directly connect with them all from the dashboard. You can also see any mentions of you on social networks directly from within Nimble. It is such a time saver and will help you and your business be much more productive!
#4 Backup and Sync in the Cloud: SpiderOak
#5 Email in the Cloud: Google Apps
#6 Security & Encryption in the Cloud: Private Internet Access VPN*
#7 Social Media Sharing in the Cloud: Buffer
A lot of the people I meet tend to use Hootsuite to manage their various social networks. However whenever I explain Buffer to them they usually instantly see the benefit. Buffer is a scheduling tool for your social networks. Each of your networks has a queue of posts and a posting schedule. When the next time for a post is scheduled, Buffer posts the post which is at the front of the queue. I use Buffer for 3 of my Twitter accounts, my person Facebook account as well as my two Facebook business pages, my LinkedIn profile and company page, app.net and my Google+ Business page. It is a huge time saver for time strapped businesses- meaning that you can schedule your posts throughout the week. I use it to share interesting content with my followers and fans- which is important in building up my reputation as well as trust. The Awesome Plan which allows posting to up to 12 social networks costs $10 per month.
#8 Social Media Relationships in the Cloud: Commun.it
#9 Document Sharing & Lead Generation in the Cloud: edocr
I have mentioned edocr a few times before with a complete guide and on my 10 Must Have Social Media Tools article. As a business you will be creating content- that may be on a blog, customer documents, white papers, manuals, guides and more. You may have these to hand for emailing to your clients, or the facility to download these from your website, but how can you give these a bit more exposure? edocr hosts your documents and makes them accessible to a much wider audience. It does this by showcasing your documents on the edocr web site under specific categories. You can link your edocr profile to your Google+ profile which will highlight to Google you as author. You (or other people) can also embed edocr documents on blogs and other websites. When someone reads one of your documents, edocr can interact with other apps such as Nimble or just send you an email- perfect for lead generation.
#10 Real People Web Analytics in the Cloud: CANNDi
- Their name
- Phone number
- Their location
- Their company
- How engaged they are (how many visits, which pages they visit, where they come from)
It does this by cleverly syncing information from contact forms, comments, mailing lists and other methods. You can even use your favourite mailing list system (for example MailChimp) to track who is clicking through to your website. If CANDDi can't work out exactly who the person is, it can still tell you their rough location and perhaps the company they work for or own. CANDDi isn't just for your website either, it can integrate telephone tracking too. This is a fantastic high level lead generation tool. CANDDi isn't cheap (it starts from £99/mth) but it's not expensive when you compare it to far less effective forms of advertising and marketing platforms.
#11 Telecommunication & Phones in the Cloud: Soho66*
- Play welcome message
- Connect to Office VOIP phones for 10 seconds
- If no answer then phone office AND home VOIP phones for 10 seconds
- If still no answer then phone office and home VOIP phones and mobile/cell phones for 10 seconds
- If still no answer, redirect to voicemail
You can set up business hours for your calls so that calls outside of these times are directed to your voice mail straight away. You can record calls and store them securely. You can also set up an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system that allows the caller to choose which extension or department to be directed to by pressing a key on their phone. You can receive faxes and send faxes by email (yes, some people still use faxes!). Unfortunately, Soho66 is only available in the United Kingdom, but there will be quality VOIP providers where you are located if you live outside the UK. If you live in the United States or Canada, you could check out Google Voice. Although not as flexible as a full VOIP provider it does provide some of these features.
Conclusion
So, are you ready to embrace The Cloud? Have you already done so? What services do you or your business use? As always let me know your thoughts, dear reader, in the comments below!
I am looking for an effective solution to manage my business calls. the post clarifies my doubt and helps me to choose the best one. Thanks for sharing.
The tips and tricks that are given here to have the cloud computing system for the boost of the business are very useful for those who really want to have their business to grow and also to have the best of the cloud system. Turbocharging of any of the business is not as easy as it looks but the user can do the hard work for it.
I think these new technologies enable business and people to make better things, to make them faster and better. We all benefit from these technologies whether they are small and large.
Some Articles I would like to share as well:
The technologies of Tomorrow and the Future It takes a lot of time and effort to get it right. Thank you for helping
Here is two more articles about about Cloud
Basics of Cloud Services for your Business
Why Migrate your Business to a Cloud Service Today
Hi Ian, great compilation. I use (and resell) Nimble, which is a fantastic Social CRM for Sales focused people and teams. Hootsuite is a mainstay, with Buffer for extra sharing. Commun.it I’ve explored.
CANDDI sounded fascinating, until I saw the price. I think this whole ‘360 degree view’ with social, email and website visitor/contact journey tracking will be a 2014 growth area.
Two GMAIL extensions I find helpful are ContactMonkey (open & click alerts) and Boomerang (schedule and follow-up reminders).
Thanks, Mark, really appreciate you taking the time to leave a comment.
As you can tell I am a big Nimble fan. I didn’t realise you could resell it- sounds like a good set up you have.
I’m not a Hootsuite fan myself (read more about that here) but I think it can work very well for a lot of businesses (and to be balanced, I wrote 7 reasons why you should use Hootsuite here)
I’ve been really impressed with CANDDi and it’s of particular interest to me as they’re based just down the road. However, you’re right, the price is very high- it will put off a lot of small businesses and unfortunately it’s not something I can continue to invest in in the short term. However I do think it’s a very high quality lead generator. £99/mth isn’t that much if it brings in £1000s of business in a month.
I’ve come across Boomerang but not ContactMonkey. I’ll check them out- thanks! I am always looking for new cool tools. I am sure you heard that Nimble launched a GMail Extension called Nimble Contacts Widget for GMail. Have you given it a go?
Hi Ian,
For me, alignment with strategic sales solution providers is important and being part of an eco-system. Therefore, the alignment of Google, Nimble and Hootsuite is core.
Nimble now has the Gmail extension and the Hoosuite extension (and one for Outlook) so when you’re in those apps you can still access and update Nimble.
LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ are my networks for B2B sales so the Facebook issues you highlight don’t apply, and reporting, link shortening etc. are non-issues for me.
What I’d like to add is an email marketing system that fitted the ecosystem (several have been suggested) plus visitor focused analytics (Google Analytics is good but CANDDI sounded so much better).
Any suggestions?
Good to meet online.
Mark.
Hi Mark. I can see how integrating Google, Nimble and Hootsuite could be incredibly powerful. If only I wasn’t so hooked on Buffer and other platforms too! I’ve been impressed the way Nimble can export leads from MailChimp and now I have MailChimp generating leads direct from Twitter using Twitter lead generation cards (which I will be blogging about soon).
What are you looking for in an email marketing system? I assume you don’t just mean a newsletter service such as MailChimp or AWeber? I’ve heard a few people recommend Infusionsoft but it isn’t something I’ve looked into.
Would you ever consider CANDDi? Is it the price that puts you off? It might be worth giving it a trial.
Hi Ian, I don’t see Buffer as a bad fit, in fact I use it to post to Google, LinkedIn and Facebook pages. I’ve have used Aweber and Mailchimp but not got past how they handle lists – black hole about where contacts have gone. Interested in your Twitter Lead Gen Cards comment though. I hope I pick up on your article when you’ve written it. Using InTouchCRM for email at the moment. It has so much potential as an integrated Sales & Marketing system, UK based too 🙂 I’ve researched Infusionsoft, and used loopfuse and Leadsius and looked at other MA systems. Great for 10k+ email contacts but a bit of a sledge-hammer for smaller B2B. Biggest issue I find is the disconnect between Sales side Contact Management / SFA and Marketing side database and email. In a Sales role I need Lead Gen through social and email marketing into SFA PLUS the ability to put Noy Yet Ready leads back into email nurture with an alert when they re-awaken. So Bi-Directional link between say Nimble and Email. I’ve heard people say Active Campaign is a good fit but not investigated and piloted yet. And then there’s customer journey… Read more »
I would add Zoolz to the “must have cloud services” not only because I work in the company ( hey I don’t wanna be a spammer ;p ) but because you can either choose from the Home Unlimited plan to the Business one that is sure to fit anyone’s needs with a pivotal price 😉 Worth the look, I guarantee that 🙂
https://www.zoolz.com/
Hi Sara. Thanks for your comment and thanks for being up front that you’re from Zoolz. I don’t mind people commenting about apps from the company they work for as long as we can all be objective about things. I’ve not come across Zoolz before, what do you feel sets it apart from your competitors? It seems like a crowded market with the likes of Carbonite, Box, Sugarsync, Syncplicity, Mozy, Dropbox and SpiderOak. Where are your servers based? I see it can back up to another computer or hard drive, but is this instant (i.e. can you call this syncing)? You say you offer “military grade” 256 AES Encryption- but that doesn’t really mean much unless you adopt client side password encryption. Do you? If the FBI/CIA came knocking at your door, demanding that you encrypt a users storage, could you? That’s what makes me confident about SpiderOak. I’d love to know more, so please feel free to contact me through my contact form.
Hey Ian, thank you for appreciating my straightforwardness and here are my answers to all of your questions (hopefully 🙂 Well, first off, our servers are based on the Amazon AWS. What sets us apart in such a crowded business? Well, our centralized business Management is definitely one major factor; we were able to utilize the low cost on Amazon Glacier and building technology to make storing on Glacier practical as well as cost effective, we also give an option to backup locally using Hybrid+ for faster recovery. It can be scheduled to backup every 3 minutes, however, we are not syncing; the services you have mentioned either delete the files stored on the external hard disk if you fail to connect after a specific time; for example if the hard disk failed, limits the number of external media to backup, or doesn’t even support backing up external drives. Our service is meant to be used to store all your data to the cloud for a lifetime, regardless of the life shelf of the actual media it was stored on. As for security, we adopt client side, data transfer and server side encryption; some of the products you have mentioned… Read more »
Thanks for your reply, Sara. Very helpful.
I’ll certainly check out Zoolz a lot more as I think it might be the right solution for some businesses. It’s definitely good that you’ve adopted client side encryption. Do we as uses have the option to manage our encryption key? Do you offer 2 step/multifactor authentication?
I think it’s great that, as well as offering cloud backup, you are offering backup to an external hard drive. However, isn’t that what Carbonite offers too? Correct me if I am wrong.
Certainly your pricing when compared to SpiderOak business plans, but I couldn’t work out the difference between your “Terabyte Cloud Storage” and Zools plans. The Zools plans look a lot more expensive. As for me, I’m very happy with the standard SpiderOak product which at $100/Tb/yr seams very reasonable.
Hey Ian, sure no prob. Eager to view your own review though 🙂
As for the 2 step authentication, we have replaced it with the fact that you can only access your data if you login with your account password and the encryption password, however, we will consider adding that in the future.
With Carbonite if your external drive gets malfunctioned or lost, carbonite will delete the data off their servers. Same goes with Network drives:
http://www.carbonite.com/blog/cloud-backup-blog/2012/12/20/Make_the_Best_of_Your_Backup_Tip_9_Keeping_External_Hard_Drives_Connected.aspx
https://carbonite.service-now.com/business/kb_view.do?correlation_id=4954
With Zoolz we do not have that limitation.
As for the pricing you are referring to, it is for personal & professional use and not for a business that has 10-20 employees. If you want to install and deploy on the entire company and manage the storage, you will need to use their $600/TB per month plan. Which compares as deployment and user management to our $300/Year/TB plan.
As for the Zoolz Plans we are working on revising it, however, most businesses, are using and only needing the Terabyte Cloud storage and not the regular Zoolz Plans.
Just like your article explains that you use more than one Cloud tool to manage and access your data.
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