One year ago today, the NY/NJ area woke up to the reality of devastation and no infrastructure, including no electric, and our lives and businesses were put on hold for one or more weeks. For small and medium businesses, it would be weeks without power unless you were fortunate enough to have a facility with backup generators and plenty of fuel. Battery-only UPS's were depleted in one hour, you probably had no internet in your office and your phone system was probably dead. If continuous power wasn't available, and your data was all on your own local servers, there wasn't a lot that you could do.
As for me? I never stopped working. Since my Email (Gmail), accounting (QuickBooks Online), CRM (Zoho CRM), and my files (Google Drive) were all out in the Cloud, I accessed everything via my iPad and Android Phone, because 3G/4G/LTE were working. I could use the iPad all day, re-charging each night from my car. And I had recently been given a keyboard for the iPad which made it easier to use as my desktop.
One medium-sized business here in Monmouth County who had moved everything to SaaS & Cloud over the previous year and now found themselves with a dark office, sent their key employees with laptops out to hotels in Eastern Pennsylvania, where they continued to conduct business, handling customer service calls, taking orders, and providing service, with little or no impact on their customers. How? Because they had done away with servers in their office and moved their data to SaaS business software solutions.
Don't let your IT provider ever tell you that SaaS/Cloud is more expensive, that it's not secure, or that you're safer having your data in your office, right where you can see it. When I total up the costs of a new server every 5 years, including Remote Access, VPNs, Microsoft Server licensing and the Managed Support Contract to keep it all running, and the purchase costs of each On Premises software that I need including annual upgrade and support agreements plus the cost for consultants to install, upgrade, fix and repair it all, I save money paying just the monthly or annual subscription costs for all of my SaaS software, and I'm always on the latest version, and most importantly, I can access my data from anywhere, anytime, even in the midst of devastation.
I've never looked back, and I'll never go back to my own servers and PC-era software.