CPA Practice Advisor published an article last month about the results of the latest Brother Small Business Survey. You can read the full article here.
The biggest takeaway from the Brother Small Business Survey is the fact that, “More than half of small business owners say they would prefer to invest in their businesses this year, rather than stockpiling cash, an 18-percent swing in preference since 2010.”
Investing in your business can involve any number of things—hiring new employees, upgrading your technology, moving to new office space, or establishing a larger marketing plan geared at bringing in even more leads.
However, you may want to look closely at upgrading your company’s technology. According to the article, 67% of survey respondents want to invest in making a tech change in 2015. But it doesn’t stop there. The survey also showed that they should aim to invest more in Cloud computing. Among the 62% of respondents who use the Cloud, 95% found the Cloud beneficial to their company.
Cloud computing can do wonders for your business. Some of the benefits of Cloud computing include:
- File storage and backup
- Disaster recovery
- Access from anywhere
- Decreases your paper usage
- Flexibility in delivering IT services
- Provides access to more servers without taking up room in your office
- Frees your staff up for other projects
In the Brother Small Business survey, 34% of respondents said the Cloud has saved them money, and 69% of respondents noticed the benefits of easier access, analysis, and storage of their data.
The ability to store and access data anywhere from any internet-connected device is the aspect of Cloud computing that appeals to most small businesses. Storing all of your data in the Cloud eliminates the need for large, bulky servers, and frees up some of your office space.
In the event that a disaster occurs, in which your office suffers a fire, flood, or other natural disaster, you’ll come out of it in far better shape if you’ve regularly backed up your files to Cloud storage.
Here at eFileCabinet, we had a client using our Cloud backup services. The company, Fosselman & Associates of Anchorage, Alaska, had their entire building destroyed in a fire. They were able to save their server, but everything else in the building was lost.
However, since they’d consistently had files safely backed up by eFileCabinet, all of their business files were still available to them. In fact, the day after the fire, Fosselman & Associates was able to rent a building and get back to work almost immediately, with 10 years of tax returns intact.
Stories like this make it easy to see why so many small business owners would like to invest in Cloud computing this year. If it’s something you’ve been thinking about doing, now is the time!
If you’d like to know more about the Brother Small Business survey, you can read the article from CPA Practice Advisor here.