The term “Big Data” is now used to basically describe a service where you put your trust and faith into a third party to house all your digital stuff. Or to put it simply, “Cloud”. Most of you know Big Data as services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 and Microsoft Skydrive.
Free Big Data is, simply put, anything you can use which is a Big Data service that’s free.
In the small-biz realm, you basically have two choices for Free Big Data, that being Google Apps and Microsoft’s Windows Live Admin Center.
Why only those two? Because to the best of my knowledge they are the only two where you can administer @yourcompanyweb.site users totally free. In plain English, this means you@yourcompanyweb.site could in fact be administered as a Windows Live or Gmail account, along with any other employee accounts you want to put in the system. The biggest advantage to this is that if an employee leaves the company, you can simply disable their employee account. With separated non-company accounts, you can’t do that, and that can end up turning into a nightmare in short order if some ex-employee isn’t exactly the nicest of people if you catch my meaning.
Anyway, you have the choice of either Microsoft or Google. I’m not saying one is better than the other. What I am saying is that those are your two choices for Free Big Data.
Your other option is to house all the data yourself, on-site, using your own server(s). It’s most likely true you’d elect to use Microsoft Exchange simply because setup and administration is mostly-painless compared to doing it the Linux way. This isn’t to say Linux can’t get the job done, but as a small-biz owner, Exchange is typically easier for the small-biz owner to deal with (especially if he or she isn’t that technically inclined).
I should note that there is also the option to “rent” Exchange online, either through Microsoft directly or via co-located server, but I’m going to stick to the options of Free Big Data or house-it-yourself.
The fear of Big Data “knowing all your stuff”
A concern some small-biz owners have is that if you’re housing your data in the cloud via a third party, the threat of others potentially knowing your company’s internal dealings is a concern.
All I can say here is that in the grand scheme of things, as a small-biz owner you are a drop in the ocean. Neither Microsoft nor Google truly cares what your company does as long as you’re not doing anything illegal, and neither has any interest in spying on you for the simple reason it doesn’t make them any money. If it did make them money, that would be another story. But it doesn’t.
The liability factor
Big Data basically eliminates the liability concern, and what I mean by that is this: Everything in the cloud is automatically backed up, and you simply don’t have to worry about it. This is not to say you shouldn’t regularly make backups of important data locally, but the fact your biz data is safely stored “out there” means you don’t have to be concerned about some local in-house server ‘blowing up’ on you.
Example: You leave the office for the day, and over the course of the night a big storm comes by. Lightning strikes the building and blammo, a few computers in the office get fried. This is is really no big deal since your data isn’t housed there.
The scalability factor
Companies across the world are running ancient PCs and backing up their stuff with ancient software for the reason it cannot be upgraded. This is why so many companies small and large are still running very old, very clunky blow-up-at-any-minute stuff.
Big Data is infinitely scalable. As cliché as this sounds, Big Data grows with you. You use as much or as little as you want, keep costs down, and can completely skirt being pigeonholed by non-upgradeable technology.
In other words, if you have a computer than can run a modern web browser, that’s basically all you need.
Big Data is ready for the mobile future
This above all else is what makes Big Data better than keeping everything in-house.
Big Data is completely mobile-connected right now. You can access your contacts, calendaring, docs, spreadsheets and other stuff all from your phone and do it all for free with Big Data.
In plain English: With Big Data you could effectively run your business from your phone because the apps and integration are there already. Schedule a meeting, set a calendar event, send an email, or whatever… doesn’t matter. It can all be done from the phone.
To get this same level of functionality out of an in-house solution is nothing short of a huge pain in the ass – and costly.
At the end of the day, Big Data does save you a ton of money
In the business world there’s this thing called ROI (return-on-investment). Well, you obviously get maximum ROI by using the free stuff that Big Data offers. Small-biz owners all count their pennies very carefully, and when there’s a way to get something done for zero cost that actually works, yeah, they’ll go for it.
To answer the question posed in the title of this article directly, yes, Free Big Data is safe for small-biz to use. At this point it has some tenure and has matured enough to where you can trust the technology.
Should you as the small-biz owner implicitly trust Big Data tech? No. You should always be skeptical and cautious as any good small-biz owner would be when it comes to this stuff. The point however is that you can use the tech, administer it easily, use it easily and get actual work done.
The only real choice you have to make is whether you prefer Microsoft or Google, or more specifically, Windows Live or Gmail. I cast my vote for Microsoft for basically two reasons. First, Office Live is generally speaking more ‘compatible’ with the biz world compared to Google Docs, and the free Windows Live Mail client allows for easy sync of mail, calendaring and contacts locally whereas Google has no such local client. Google on the other hand has the advantage of super-easy collaboration and does it better than Microsoft. But like I said, at the end of it all it’s your choice of which camp to go with.
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old article ? office live was discontinued since time ago in favor of office 365.
It wasn’t discontinued. You could technically call it “SkyDrive Docs” via Word Web App or Excel Web App and it’s the same thing.