Ironically, a prominent reason many small and medium-sized business are joining the cloud is the same reason many are hesitant to: security. A common myth is that as a company transitions to a cloud solution, they take a hit in the security of their data assets. In fact, the opposite is true. It’s a simple economies of scale argument: a specialized IT provider has more resources to devote to security than a small business. Instead of a single IT guy/Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none, your business receives a team of masters.

A September article in the Wall Street Journal points to other reasons for the transition. “Basic security tasks that often don't get done at a small enterprise—updating antivirus programs or applying patches to software—are usually part of the plain-vanilla package in the cloud.”

It might surprise you to learn that the “IT Provider Next Door” in Knoxville, Tennessee, Claris Networks, has one of the fastest clouds on the planet. A third-party development team called Cloud Sleuth has created an objective application to examine and report the response times of cloud infrastructures around the world. At the time of this writing, Claris Networks supports the tenth fasted cloud on the planet. 

The competition is steep, and Claris is holding its own against the big boys as well. The Windows Azure, Rackspace and Google Apps Engine clouds are in the top ten alongside your Knoxville-based cloud provider.