Three Technologies that Small Businesses Must Use in 2015

There’s a tension between the innovation and efficiency that small businesses can bring to bear on the marketplace, and the backwards and inefficient business processes that often make their way into the small business on account of these companies having to handle too many things with too little manpower.

The cloud is making it easier for small business to keep up with the latest backend solutions, however, both enabling feature sets previously only reserved for big enterprises and giving access to the small firm without requiring much investment in time.

Here are three technologies that every small business should be using in 2015 to stay competitive. Unsurprisingly, all three are cloud-based and therefore relatively easy to deploy.

Virtual PBX System. The traditional phone system is dead, and in its place is a more cost effective, easier, full-featured hosted solution.

The virtual PBX enables small businesses to have all the features once reserved for larger firms, such as auto attendants and call forwarding. It also enables employees to place and receive calls from anywhere, an important factor in our mobile world where business is increasingly conducted from the road.

Hosted CRM. Customers are at the heart of every business, and it is important both to track and manage these customer relationships. Customer relations management software helps make this possible, and no business can afford to go without CRM software in 2015.

Thankfully, most CRM solutions now have cloud-based versions that small businesses can deploy immediately. These solutions make importing and maintaining contacts easy, and give employees access to this key data from the office or on the road via smartphone.

Cloud storage. If your business does not have its documents stored in the cloud, you should. Not only does the cloud come with automatic protection against hard drive failure, once a common scourge of small business, but it also makes documents easily sharable and accessible across a business.

There are a multitude of affordable cloud storage solutions available, including Google Drive.

Not only does cloud storage make documents easier to share and access, but it also makes searching for the right document easy. While it still can be hard to find the right files on laptops and smartphones, searching for them in the cloud is easy and efficient.

Edited by Maurice Nagle