One of the great things about our Small Business Management Course is that we’ve put all our training materials online, allowing students to access the training materials from any PC, anytime, anywhere. But our training materials aren’t the only things to have gone online; now — thanks to cloud storage software — your business files can go online, too.
Back in the Ol’ Days
It wasn’t that long ago that teleworking or operating a home-based business was an awkward, sometimes arduous task. Think back to, say, 2006. For bookkeepers, teleworking meant routinely travelling to your client’s business to get their files; for graphic designers, it meant clients had to drop off a CD or USB flash drive of images if the file sizes exceeded emailing capability; and for office workers, teleworking was pretty much an impossible luxury.
Fast Forward to Dropbox
The development of the file hosting service Dropbox has changed the way people worked online irrevocably; and for the better.
Dropbox founder, Drew Houston, first conceived of the idea when he was still at university because he was always forgetting his USB flash drive containing his assignments, course work and so on.
He originally began working on a file hosting service for his own personal use, but it wasn’t long before he realised that others could also benefit from it.
Houston then secured seed funding from start-up incubator, Y Combinator, and Dropbox was officially launched in 2008; it’s since gone on to generate around $240 million in revenue and the likes of Bono and The Edge (of rock band, U2, fame) are investors in the company.
Access Made Easy
It’s not hard to see why Dropbox is popular: it’s allowed small businesses to store their files in a way that only large organisations with the equally large amount of resources, previously could.
By storing your business files online, you’re able to access any file, from any PC, anytime, without needing to back them up on an external hard drive.
But it also makes sharing files with your employees easier, too — no more bulky emails that take 35 minutes to send and another 35 minutes to download.
Dropbox has become one of the premier business tools in the cloud storage space. In fact, they’re now even offering webinars on how to increase your productivity using Dropbox.
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If you operate a home-based business and your files aren’t backed up in the cloud, Dropbox could be the answer. Just like it was easier for our students to access the content of our Small Business Management Course when it went online, Dropbox, too, will make it easier for you to access your files whenever, wherever.