Many small business owners have shied away from the cloud for security reasons. That is fast becoming an outdated notion, though, and soon most businesses of all sizes will migrate to the cloud precisely because it offers a greater level of network security than an in-house server.

The likes of Microsoft are opening data centres in the UK now and the big names are going into data in a major way, including Amazon with its Amazon Web Services and Google. That is putting names that everyone can trust on the cloud.

These are names that simply cannot afford data breaches, so they are investing vast amounts in security and installing failsafe after failsafe. Cloud computing also provides a greater opportunity to check for security breaches. By turning some of the computing power in on itself, companies using cloud computing power have huge processors running constant checks and logs to make sure there is no suspect file or attacker that has breached its defences.

With the level of investment, of course the big names have teams of staff devoted to making sure the cloud is running smoothly for their customers and resellers, too, which goes well beyond what most small businesses can hope to do in terms of computer security.

Not only do they watch their cloud services constantly, they also have backup after backup, so there are many copies of your data at any one time and there is almost no chance of losing your data.

It is still a big step to move to the cloud and it can be helpful to use a managed service provider to take care of the IT support and to make the step to cloud computing as smooth and painless as possible. But once small businesses truly embrace the cloud and stop storing customer data on potentially much more vulnerable servers and computers in their own system, the more secure their IT system will be.

Nothing is unbeatable, but the resources poured into the cloud’s security vastly outweigh anything an SME can manage with its own in-house system. So even if you’ve been avoiding the cloud on security grounds, it is probably time to look at the situation again.