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Showing that cloud computing can work for a fairly wide array of businesses, a recent feature in The Australian profiled Melbourne-based Fitstyler, a company which in 2006 realized that a growing interest in outdoor fitness training provided an opportunity.

The company operates sessions across Melbourne and has two established franchise partners, since as founder and managing director Andrew Talati says, "You see a lot of gyms and indoor personal training, but no one was really addressing the demand for outdoors training.”

So as the Australian says, he started with “a simple customer relationship management (CRM) system that ran on an Apple (News - Alert) Mac computer in his office, but obviously his company’s growth outstripped that system.

"We needed to find a way of centralizing the database and have it accessible by multiple people," he said, adding that "I investigated running my own centralized server, however, when I went through the expenses of creating and maintaining it, I found that it is fraught with danger and can be a very expensive exercise."

So he decided that cloud computing was the way to go, buying hosting capacity from Queensland-based data center Conetix for office productivity apps as well as a CRM suite, praising its “ability it provides to grow in the future as demands change.”

He specifically pointed to the scalability of cloud. "You can't scale resources when you have your own server on your own premises. You really have to go out and buy more resources than you actually require to cover yourself."

And hey, it’s a concept he’s familiar with: As the Australian says, the cost of using cloud services has dropped significantly, putting it within reach of all SMBs. "It's a bit like personal training," Talati says. "When it first came out it was only for the wealthy, but over time economies of scale put it within reach of more people. This is what is happening with cloud computing."