Have you heard a cloud horror story or two? Tales of businesses that lost data or got overcharged or couldn’t migrate off their managed cloud services when they wanted to? For every cloud horror story you hear, the business has most likely made one or more of the following mistakes. The truth is, cloud services are not difficult to use, are extremely affordable, and serve as powerful tools for endowing your business with technology without adding to the complexity of your business or IT department. You just have to know how to avoid the potential pitfalls …

1. Get a One-Trick Pony

Managed cloud services are often billed as software services or data storage or a backup solution. But the ideal way to approach the cloud is to find a fully-featured cloud-based IT service management company that you can partner with for all of your cloud needs. Instead of tucking a cloud-based application here and a cloud-based data store there, contract with a cloud provider that can offer everything you need: under one roof, for one price, with a single contract. This drastically simplifies your business processes. Find out the potential for cloud services when you download the whitepaper: Managed IT Services For Small Businesses.

2. Don’t Even Ask About Their Downtime & Security Histories

Asking for a managed cloud service’s downtime and security history may feel a bit like asking a lady for her age. Or worse, her weight! This is where it gets real. But you simply have to find out how well they’ve been able to achieve uptime and prevent data breaches, malware, and other security issues before you agree to hand over the keys to your kingdom – which is exactly what a cloud service gets. They’ll have all your data and business applications in the palm of their hand. Be sure they take this part of the job seriously.

3. Pay No Attention to Where Your Cloud Service’s Data Center is Located

A few months from now, you arrive at your office, fill your favorite mug with steaming coffee, sit down, and power on your computer. You try to pull up your work system and … nothing. You vaguely remember hearing the radio newscaster blabbering about an earthquake in India or wildfires in California or a hurricane barreling up the Gulf Coast, but you didn’t relate that to your managed cloud services provider. Until now.

Choose a provider that’s not in a disaster-prone area of the country. There’s another reason to avoid non-US cloud services, and that’s the varying international laws regarding data privacy. Find a cloud provider close to home and outside the crosshairs of known regular threats; you’ll be very glad you did when disaster does strike those areas of the globe.

4. Neglect to Consider How Cloud Services Play Into Your Mobile Management Plans

For the small business, one of the greatest challenges is providing mobile solutions. It requires a comprehensive IT infrastructure, plus a team of app developers. If you’re allowing BYOD (which the majority of small businesses are), then you’ll have to employ developers with multiple skills, including the ability to program for numerous Android operating systems, iOS, Windows mobile OS, and likely a few others. This puts mobile empowerment out of range for most growing companies. But managed cloud services can empower all of your mobile users and devices, for a fraction of the cost and effort of trying to do this in-house.

Are you ready to avoid these mistakes and partner with the managed cloud services provider you need to succeed?