 Cloud computing has been around for a long time. It's more of a marketing term than it is a technical term. But what we found is that it is a great resource for clients that don't want to spend a lot of money on infrastructure. With cloud computing, before people used it as heavily as they do now, everything had to be on your computer, be that a desktop or a laptop, or on the server in your office. Cloud is all over, so there is not typically one place. And when we talk about the public cloud, that may mean Google, for example. Your data is not in one location. It's in many locations. Or you can do a private cloud, which says, I want to use someone's server in their data center. And I want to know where that is. Data is a lot safer in a data center than it was in the broom closet next to the mop bucket in our office. You can track where your employees are, where your team is. You can add up and send an invoice. You can check and see what was I supposed to be doing at this location, and what are the names of these people, and where am I in relation to where I'm supposed to be? What does my schedule look like, and what's next? It's also a way to transfer information from the head office to this without constantly making 1,000 phone calls. So there's many things that you can use a tablet for. I still don't recommend it for keyboard intensive things like bookkeeping, or sending out long emails, or things like that. But with all the apps that are out there, we're seeing it using the medical field and the legal field and in all sorts of different businesses, especially businesses with teams that are out of the office. Tablets are great also as a sales tool. You can show or walk a client through the process of what you're trying to do or what your product may offer. With a cell phone, you can't do that. So visually, you're more limited. But in terms of navigation and passing basic information, we use them all the time. It's increasingly a better way of communicating than trying to hunt somebody down or getting them on the phone is that you were just texting back and forth. So with smartphones, you can get a lot of those same apps. You can get on an iPad or a different type of tablet. The first step would be potentially moving your email outside of your office, having it on an online place so that if your computer dies, it's no problem. You have to get a new computer. But if your server has an issue, you can still get to that email, right? I use an old computer. If mine dies, all of my data's on the cloud, I just pull it back. That's step one. Step two is I would use a service like Dropbox. If you're just looking at basic files that are not complicated and it's not a database of any type, Dropbox allows you to share files in your office and also allows you to have plenty of space to push your data up there with security so not everybody can see it. But it's on your computer and backed up to the cloud. And you can access it with all your devices. If you have databases and things work related, those are harder to back up. But if you just have Excel and Word documents, pictures, there's all sorts of services being offered by Microsoft, Google, Dropbox that allow you to either back it up or store it on the cloud and bring it back and forth between the cloud and your computer whenever you need it. There may be some things that have to stay on the server that aren't ready to be moved into the cloud. Maybe there's a way you manage your cleaning practice or maybe there's a accounting piece of software that needs to stay there because the online version of that software is not good or not ready. QuickBooks is an example. QuickBooks has a QuickBooks online program. It's used by a lot of people. It's getting better. It is still not fully featured. I think that if you have a good password and you go with a known brand and they post their security policies online, we now feel comfortable banking online for the most part. We feel comfortable paying a lot of our bills online. I think one day we will look back and laugh and say, you know, I didn't have a generator in my backyard to generate my power. I didn't keep my money under the mattress. I kept it in a bank. I don't know the people to do this. In my opinion, if you have a good password and you go with a good reputable company, I think your data is safer in the cloud. This notion of it's safer here on my office computer with my password on a post-it note on the monitor, that's just not true. A lot of these companies have already put in the same type of encryption and security measures that your bank uses. A total location typically means I can take your equipment and put it in my data center. Or what they can do is we can take their equipment and mirror what they have in another location and constantly have that there so we can provide that back to them whenever they need it. Or in the event there's a hurricane or a fire, they can just connect to this new server. I think you've always got to have your data in two locations on a server, at least backed up once in your office, and then backed up off-site. I don't think it's neither or scenario. I think it's even if you have tapes, even if you have hard drives, there should be some type of solution that you have online that runs every night that's outside of your location. Servers are expensive. Hardware is expensive. And when you move a lot of your data to the cloud or use a cloud-based service, you might can put off or even avoid spending all that money on a new server. There are costs associated with moving your data to the cloud. There's the time involved that you might have to pay somebody to do it or you could do it yourself. But then once you have it there, they typically charge you on a per server basis if you need servers or on a per gig basis if you're just looking at eight gigabytes of data. And that may be between 50 cents to a dollar a gig for the professional business services that work well per month. Or it could be a lot less than that if you're just doing files, like we do the photographs of my family at my house, we bag those up online. They run every night and we pay a flat fee every year, which could be $100 a year for a lot of data. We don't recommend that businesses, no matter how small they are, we don't recommend that they have one internet connection and only one. I think you can get a cheap backup connection like DSL for between $35 and $50 depending on where you're located. So there should always be a backup internet connection. You will need to have that. If in the case that your system goes down, if you've got a cloud-based solution, you can go to a location that offers wireless and connect and still get to your information. Or with your phone, you should be able to get your files with Dropbox or your email with one of the solutions like Microsoft 365 or Google Apps, whichever one that may be, you can still get to that. It's perfectly natural to be nervous about moving your data from your computer or from your network closet to another place. It's nervous about that because if you lose that data, all of a sudden you don't know where your accounts receivables are. You're not sure where you're supposed to be tomorrow and I understand that. But before you go out as a small business and spend a lot of money on hardware, it's worth looking at the cloud options to see which ones are available to you and which ones make sense. And the first steps are typically email and maybe file sharing, maybe a cloud-based antivirus solution for managing for your team. But over time, there'll be more options that open up. So consider these steps, it's all going mobile, it's all going to the cloud and you don't wanna be putting yourself in a position that's less competitive because you can't do what the others are doing.