Six cloud services we use to run our business

Six cloud services we use to run our business

As Chief Technical Officer for FreeAgent – an online accounting system – it’s probably no surprise that I believe virtually all IT tools are moving online, to ‘the cloud’. The days of rolling out shrink-wrapped software to a business are long over.

In fact, at FreeAgent we’ve already gone a long way down that road. Everyone in our company uses a whole plethora of online services, every day. Here are six that have become essential to our business:

• We rely on Google Apps for email, spreadsheets and documents, instead of using the more traditional Microsoft Office suite.
• Zendesk helps us provide customer support by managing and dealing with requests quickly and effectively. It means we never miss a support request.
• Like many other companies, we use Salesforce as a business development tool.  It’s great for helping us identify and manage opportunities.
• Geeks will already know Github, an online tool for version control – this keeps track of changes we make to the FreeAgent code base.
• For project management we use both Basecamp and Trello. Both are very useful for the work we do at FreeAgent, although I especially like the flexibility that Trello provides and how it can be adapted to many workflows in different areas of a business.

There’s no guarantee, of course, that what’s right for us will be right for your company too. But I can safely say we’ve tried and tested all those tools, so they’re good places to start!

• Cloud computing – there’s nothing new under the sun
• Why it’s time to embrace the cloud
• Firms embrace the cloud, but leave IT support to chance

Olly Headey is Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of FreeAgent.