Just last week I met with an innovative small business who are looking to scale and are assessing their IT needs. Like so many small businesses they have misgivings about the benefits of the cloud, the costs involved and in particular data security. With so many different interpretations of ‘cloud computing’ and a range of ‘cloud’ offerings available Entrepreneur Country sat down with Tanya Shirlow, SMB Marketing Lead at Microsoft to get on top of the jargon that still clouds a $75bn industry.

For those small businesses who aren’t familiar with cloud computing, can you give us a brief idea of what it is?

Simply put, cloud computing is a service or application that is delivered to you via the internet. You may hear the terms Platform as a Service (PAAS), Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) or Software as a Service (SAAS). Chances are you are already using cloud services today, whether that is online shopping, online banking or if you are an established business the provision of your email service into your business. Cloud computing is a service that is run from an off-site data centre, rather than something that is run from within your business like an on premises server.

So in its broadest sense, cloud computing describes information that is stored and processed on computers somewhere else - "in the cloud" - and displayed on your screen.

What are the benefits of a cloud computing as opposed to traditional IT set-ups with servers and an IT team?

There are three key benefits I would highlight for a small business or start-up like the one you’ve been working with:

1. The first benefit is access to new capabilities at a really affordable cost. That may be the provision of a professional domain email service, the ability to have Voice Over IP (VOIP) in the business, hold webinars or to have intranet sites within the business where you can start to store documents in a central place where anyone can access them. Access to new capabilities is all about empowering your employees to optimise productivity.

2. There can be substantial financial benefits for small businesses in using cloud services as what they are doing is subscribing to a service and therefore you pay for what you use. Cloud also reduces your capital and overhead costs as you don’t necessarily have the same hardware and maintenance costs of traditional IT infrastructure. The additional financial benefit is that with cloud you to start to receive the benefits of the service as soon as it’s live- what you’ve got is an immediate access to services, so return on investment is instant as you are not waiting for the deployment of traditional IT infrastructure within the business, plus it is always up to date.

3. Finally, the benefits are with security and management. With cloud services the infrastructure is managed for you by experts. Microsoft datacentres have global reach, a commitment to security and a 99.9% uptime service level agreement. They also have SAS70 and ISO 27001 security certifications audited by an independent third party.

You touched on the importance of productivity for a small business but how can cloud computing aid this?

For a small business every minute counts. Cloud computing is about how you can make sure the productivity of your business and its employees is optimal. If you think about those external factors that will impact upon productivity like snow days, school holidays or children off sick, there are so many examples of when the business owner or the employees within the business simply can’t get to the office. Either the employee loses a day of holiday or they end up with a day of unpaid leave but what you really want to ensure is that those employees can be productive irrespective of the circumstances.

The snow days before Christmas were a perfect example, where in a company like Microsoft we were able to turn face to face meetings which would otherwise have been cancelled in to webinars so business didn’t stop- it is a great example of where cloud computing really can help a business. So the essence of productivity in smaller companies is to empower your employees to work from anywhere by giving them the right tools to do so and cloud computing is a powerful enabler.

Does cloud mean you can access your desktop from anywhere in the world at any time and what does cloud mean for wider communication management within a business?
For an SMB owner it would allow them to stay in touch with the business from anywhere with an internet connection. It is important to consider that the power of cloud can also be used for a number of important tasks such as to talk to your family, when you’re away travelling with work.

What you also find with most small businesses is that it is important that services are integrated with a range of products such as smart phones. So when using a product like Microsoft Office Mobile on your smart phone not only can you respond immediately to customer enquiries but you also have the power of Microsoft Office. That means you could edit Excel and Word documents or use it to project PowerPoint presentations. So it means you can be as productive with your phone device as with your traditional laptop.

What happens for instance with a business that has been using a particular piece of software for years and years- can they move their ‘legacy’ products into the cloud?
To be honest it depends on what those applications are. Pretty much any amount of computing power can be provisioned in the cloud. The question a customer should really be asking is what is it they need technology to deliver for their business, then decide how to provision that technology. Many technology providers are looking to deliver their services via the Cloud, customer relationship management software such as Microsoft CRM Online is a good example of an on-premise application now being delivered via the Cloud.

If you look at the Cloud services which Microsoft have for SMB’s, such as Exchange, SharePoint and Lync, the opportunity is to gain new capabilities such as the ability to run- webinars, email services, intranets and instant messaging.

Is there a generational barrier to revolutionary technologies such as cloud and does this lend itself to higher take-up amongst entrepreneurs?

That’s an interesting question that I’ll have to answer in a couple of different ways. There is a new generation of employees coming into the workplace that fundamentally work in a different way. They’ve grown up with technology, they network with each other and they’ve got a fundamentally different way of working- call them Generation Y.

Harnessing the productivity of those individuals means that companies need to consider how they empower their employees to do their best work. I don’t think it’s a generational gap but I do believe think it is about mindset and attitudes to flexibility.

One of the questions we often ask ourselves is “do you consider work as somewhere you go or something you do?” I am lucky in a company like Microsoft that they see my work as something I do and they empower me to be able to work from anywhere. So if I need to come into the office at half past ten because I’ve got another appointment, I am empowered to work in the evening from home to make the time up.

For me it is less about the generation barrier, although it is important you are able to harness the productivity from all your different generations of employees but it also about the mindset and attitude of the company.

What we see with entrepreneurs is that they are often innovative thinkers and more likely to embrace new approaches to doing things. So it’s true to say that  the cloud is likely to see a higher up take amongst entrepreneurs but largely because of the mindset and the innovative ways in which they think about how they get to market and drive their business by getting the most out of their people.

Why are Microsoft and other big technology companies moving into the cloud sector?

Analysts including Yankee Group predicts that Software as a Service (SaaS) global sales will outpace traditional software sales by next year. In the past the infrastructure to support broad cloud adoption simply wasn’t there, and the services weren’t necessarily developed enough, but if you think of what we have now got available either in the product or the infrastructure within the country to support a true cloud computing environment we are a fundamentally different place.

For me as someone who really cares about how we help our SMB’s to compete and be successful in today’s climate, it is great to see smaller customers being able to get access to these enterprise level capabilities but actually at a small business price.

What are the financial considerations and costs of cloud computing services? Are there other solutions besides cloud that SMB’s should consider?
It is going to be entirely based on what the business itself needs. The prices are definitely coming down as the market grows. If you look at the pricing for the new Office 365 service, that is going to be from £4 per user per month and when you think about the capabilities you can access for that price you can see the enormous value for money for businesses.

Small businesses need to understand themselves and what they need in order to make them successful. Part of that understanding is whether their existing technology is supporting the business or is it a hindrance to it?

Be clear about the services you need in your business to be successful and then find the best way of procuring them. If you want someone to be managing the service for you, maintaining it, making sure it is secure, making sure it is always available then cloud is absolutely the way to go. It will however always come down to individual business owner choice as to what is most relevant for them.

How realistic is the premise that a business can go to market faster using cloud services?

It’s a reality in my experience. However it does depend on what they are looking for. Just last week I was at an event called ‘Working Mums Live’. This event was completely focussed on women who want to return to work and who aren’t sure whether this is going to be for a family flexible employer or whether they will be starting up their own business. We were running a seminar on what technology you need to start up your own business and were describing a service that Microsoft provides called the Office Live Small Business. This is where you can go and provision a website and domain name and add email to it, which is all free of charge except the domain name which you have to buy.

So for no cost a small business start-up can go to this website and in a matter of hours can have a fully functioning company website with a domain attached to it and a business email account and can be up and running. And a SharePoint site can be up and running in just 9 minutes.

So you can absolutely get to market unbelievably quickly but to stress once again you have to be clear about what it is your business needs.

What are the security issues faced by SMBs with respect to cloud computing? Can the cloud be hacked?

Security is an ever present issue for all sizes of customers but small businesses could potentially be more impacted upon by a security breach. Cloud computing presents a number of very specific customer concerns which we hear regularly like “why should I trust the cloud?”, “how can I meet compliance needs within my business?” and “what industry audit security certification have you got to prove that your service works the way you say it does?”. At Microsoft we have huge amounts of experience starting with the launch of MSN in 1994. Right now we deliver over 200 cloud services to customers. What is critical for us is that regardless of whether it is personal data or business critical data we recognise that these environments need to provide a ‘trustworthy computing experience’.

That ‘trustworthy’ experience is critical, so with our Microsoft products we have a financially backed 99.9% uptime Service Level Agreement in place. The layers of security that go in to provisioning these services is phenomenal. So would I trust my data in the Microsoft cloud? Absolutely and I do.