With the global public cloud market expected to reach revenues of $66 billion by 2016, it’s clear that businesses of all sizes and verticals are turning to the cloud for its flexibility, accessibility and scalability benefits. But, for SMBs with limited staff and resources, migrating to the cloud often poses challenges.

Simply, SMBs want to have it all – and they should: Full flexibility in deployment no matter if it is CPE, managed/private cloud or hosted. This session focuses on the pros and cons of cloud solutions with regard to flexibility, scalability, costs, and other variables that can cause headaches for SMBs looking for the right cloud alternative for their unique needs, ensuring attendees will leave with the tools to grow their businesses with a robust, highperformance computing environment that won’t break the bank.

We have witnessed a sea change in how we conduct business and communicate at a personal level, thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and BYOD, the consumerization of IT, the increased number of mobile and dispersed workforces and the overall growth in cloud computing. However, the way we communicate at work has not kept pace with these profound changes. This is because the hosted and onpremise PBX phone systems that many businesses still use are inflexible, costly and do not integrate with the myriad mobile devices carried by employees.

To be competitive, business leaders will need to increase employee productivity, provide better customer service and reduce IT costs. They can move the needle on all three of these objectives by moving their phone systems to the cloud. This session is intended to cut through the jargon and acronyms, with a clear focus on helping SMBs understand why the time is now for cloudbased phone services.

In light of recent hurricanes, snowstorms, and other potential disruptions to business, SMBs face a significant challenge in maintaining business continuity. Cloudbased solutions offer alternatives that can be costeffective and efficient. This session will explore how SMBs can take advantage of these new approaches.

While the word “disaster” conjures images of Superstorm Sandy, wildfires, or earthquakes, a disaster doesn’t have to be natural to harm a business. Theft, loss, equipment failure and even human error can cause a data disaster that leaves a business without access to its important business files. Research has shown that while 81 percent of small businesses see data as their most valuable company asset, 57 percent are unprepared to protect it should disaster strike. Additionally, FEMA has stated that 40 to 60 percent of small businesses never reopen after a data disaster.

Cloud computing offers affordable and scalable solutions that help businesses protect their assets, including data and critical applications, by hosting them secure offsite locations, but many small businesses aren’t taking advantage of the cloud to ensure business continuity is a disaster scenario. This session will address the common reasons a small business owner may not have a disaster preparedness plan in place, what can happen to these businesses should a disaster strike, the benefits clouds solutions offer in the event of a disaster and how small businesses can get started on a disaster preparedness plan on their own. Attendees will walk away from the session with a list of actionable items that can be implemented immediately to help protect their business and additional resources to help further prepare them in the event of a disaster.

SMBs are constantly seeking ways to reduce costs and eliminate hassle. Cloud computing has offered an easy way to offload IT services to thirdparty providers. What SMBs don’t foresee is what happens when data is spread amongst the cloud, local networks, laptops, mobile devices, data centers, or anywhere else.

They need solutions that will allow them to securely store, track, access, and share documents and data from any device or location. This session will cover how SMBs must consider security and access as part of their overall cloud and mobile strategies, including the types of tools they need to know where their data is at all times and provide employees with the secure access, no matter the device or location, while allowing them to perform universal searches as to not lose track of critical information.

As SMB’s continue to adopt new technologies and rely on increasingly more powerful applications and services, driven by cloud computing, the technological barriers to adoption begin to fall away and SMBs gain access to the tools to help them become increasingly competitive. But the sheer volume of choice can make decisionmaking at the management level a burdensome chore, as executives try to balance technology benefits and costs to come to reasonable investment conclusions. Quite simply, the success of the new SMB SaaS and app marketplaces will largely depend upon an ability to look past the technology favor of a clear focus on business solutions. This session will discuss how SMBs can get around technology barriers to focus on the right business decisions regarding the applications and services to which they have access in a cloud market.

With the explosive growth of cloud computing as a tools for SMBs to become more competitive in their markets, questions still surround this phenomenon. Why are so many businesses looking at cloud and how much are they actually moving into cloud environments? What kinds of cloud strategies are dominating the SMB market and why? How does cloud adoption impact IT budgets – and how much should it? This session will discuss the cloud adoption among SMBs from these business perspectives, driven by research by Cisco’s consulting practice and interviews with more than 600 SMBs.

Based on extensive research involving more than 1000 small business leaders, the session will discuss the motives, actions and results of choosing cloud applications. The extensive research over two years has surfaced many aspects of the cloud trend. Some of the surprising results include reasons smaller businesses do not embrace the cloud; what are some of the critical factors in opting for a cloud application; who are the key influencers; what is holding them back.

In fact, according to industry research, hosted communications is one of the fastest growing technologies, dramatically changing the way companies do business. And rightfully so, as companies can finally replace their old phone systems and get a far more flexible communications solution for a fraction of the cost. But, it’s not just replacing one phone system for another; with hosted or cloudbased communications, companies get the benefits of outsourcing the management of the phone system, which means they need fewer resident experts to handle maintenance. What’s more, hosted cloud communications enhance flexibility and productivity by providing a range of advanced features and functionality, and it does so without straining the corporate budget.

This session will provide at least 10 reasons why cloud and hosted are growing as rapidly as they are and why your business should consider a cloudbased solution today:
1.Lower TCO
2.Minimal IT support required
3.OPEX vs. CAPEX
4.Business Continuity
5.Scalability to meet fluctuating needs
6.Increased functionality
7.Easy and automatic upgrades
8.Mobility
9.Video/Multimedia
10. Increased focus and productivity

There’s no denying it: the adoption of SaaS applications presents a host of benefits to your organization. While this is all well and good, it also relinquishes control of your application support – and more importantly, your proprietary data – to the hosting solution provider. This begs the question: what happens when that provider should unexpectedly fail to recover from a natural or worse yet, financial disaster? In this session, we’ll share with you some new thinking behind managing data assets in the cloud – and how preserving SaaS application continuity should be a key consideration in your business’ contingency planning strategy.

CIOs and IT managers and directors in the SMB market are facing significant disruption from both external customers and internal constituencies. They are required to behave as their larger counterparts do, but they are forced to rely more heavily on external vendors and suppliers for their technology needs, while meeting the needs of various groups within their organizations. In this session, you will learn how the cloud helps address all these changes and turn the IT organization from a reactive organization that is under stress and pressure, struggling to catch up with the times, to one that is ahead of the curve that partners with the business and with their vendors effectively to maximize resources and deliver synergy the new IT paradigm

Cloudbased unified communications services are helping businesses become more nimble and responsive to customers, and streamline business processes, but not all cloud unified communications solutions are alike. Pure UCaaS solutions lack reliability and many enterprise features that companies have come to rely on from traditional onpremise solutions. This presentation will discuss the differences between different deployment and management alternatives, from full cloudbased UC to hybrid solutions that combine the best of onpremises with hosted features, to deliver a foundation for understanding how the cloud can deliver true business communications advantages.

As SMBs are more than ever involved in todays global market dealing with suppliers across the globe or serving as part of a global team of suppliers to larger organizations, they are faced with the same challenges as larger organizations. But, they have merely a fraction of the investment capabilities. This session will focus on how video conferencingasaService can enable SMBs to collaborate on a global scale with suppliers, colleagues, partners and customers without the traditional capital expenditures associated with video conferencing and telepresence.

Today, cloud computing is the lifeline for many small businesses. Because of that, the performance of the cloud has become more critical than ever. Indeed, performance has superseded price in the search for the right cloud provider, becoming the critical decisionmaking factor. It is imperative that SMBs are able to accurately benchmark their operations and IT needs before heading into a search for cloud providers – The cloud is very different from a traditional IT environment, and it is even more vastly different for small business.

As SMBs look to migrate to the cloud, what implications do choosing the best service provider carry? What tests should they run or look for to make sure that their applications behave predictably and without problems in the cloud? To secure sales, cloud providers are battling when it comes to marketing cost, security, customer service, and other features and in this cloud provider web, it is difficult to distinguish one provider from another. This session will explore what to expect from the cloud and how to benchmark your business within a cloud environment and provide IT teams with a better understanding of what they need to consider before migrating to the cloud.