Don’t keep your head in the clouds, warns Prism

"Images of a great mystical server in the sky, along with reams of technical jargon, make it difficult for the majority of IT-averse SMEs to make head or tail of the benefits, let alone the drawbacks, of this new way of working," he muses. Smith warns of the inevitable security issues associated with having any company's data hosted by a third party. And he points out that there is also the risk of data loss from improper backups or system failures in a virtualised environment – where the physical location of hardware and software is unknown, he says. That said, Smith believes the cloud could be perfect for start-ups, although for established business, without the benefit of a blank canvas, "cloud isn't quite the magic potion that providers claim it to be". For him, then, cloud should part of an IT suite rather than a 'one size fits all' solution. "Prism currently supports over 5,000 end users across more than 1,000 businesses nationwide, and we can see that businesses are looking for efficiencies that can be gained through using certain aspects of cloud computing," he states. "They're beginning to see cloud computing as a complimentary service to their business infrastructure, not a replacement for it."