Cloud Computing for Small Business

This recent article at ReadWriteWeb concludes that small businesses are clueless about cloud computing.

I'm not sure that's true.

I work in a small business and know about cloud computing. We don't take advantage of it for a variety of reasons. (Full disclosure, we have an internal I.T. staff.)

We do have some of our services hosted in the cloud. Our website and a company extranet are both externally hosted (at different locations). At one point we even toyed with having Exchange hosted.

When it comes to our proprietary data, our small business has a couple of concerns

1. Privacy of the customer data on a hosted service. For the most part this is simply a concern that once you leave the data under the care of others, how can you be absolutely positively sure that no one else can see it? It's a trust issue.

2. As a small business owner, one always thinks about vendor contracts. What happens if I'm unsatisfied? What if I want my data back? How easy is it to move to another hosting service?

3. Finally, once you've outsourced your I.T. it's difficult to bring it back in house. This is usually a one way decision and for a number of small business owners, one they don't want to be locked into. For very small businesses, the decision is probably much easier.

4. Hosting companies need to make it easier for business owners to commit. They're used to marketing to I.T. types and need to start speaking business people language. Put together bundled packages for the 10 person company, the 100 person company and the 250 person company. Charge a base rate for email, a website, a virtualized application server and 500 Gb of disc space, then charge a per user/month maintenance/support/management fee. Even offer to host/manage their IP phones.

My advice to Rackspace (and others)? Think about marketing your services in a different way.