These are some of those things that mean that along with Google Drive I spend more and more of my time in the cloud even though I rarely go near Facebook and Twitter!

Amazon Web Services

Astonishing range of services, so much better (and better value) than their rivals with good tech support which you can turn on and off as you need it. I’ve used their servers, storage and database services mainly – what you’ve got to get used to is seeing computing services like a flow that you can turn on and off.

Trello

I was told about this by a friend who found it was the best system for following jobs that might have loads of forms, photos and other attachments as well special inputs from a team of engineers. I just use it as a glorified to-do list but I love it. Great for team work where there might be danger of losing detail on a project.

Duo Security

Dual Factor security (typically where you login using more than one device – e.g. laptop and phone) is requested by clients more and more as a pretty iron-clad form of system security especially for remote work. Duo have an offer that is reasonably priced for small organisations and reliably straightforward, working through either smartphone apps, telephone calls, texts or those horrible RAS keys.

Backup Buddy

This WordPress plugin makes backing up and restoring (or transferring) a WordPress site about as easy as it can be. What’s so hard I hear you say, just copy the file structure and backup the mysql database. But this makes it so straightforward, timed or on demand, and reliable and you can restore single posts rather than the whole site if necessary. And their pricing structure allows networks like common Knowledge to have unlimited site backups for a reasonable once-and-for-all fee.

ZenDesk

Such a nicely constructed Support Ticket system. No installation, it looks good, it’s so easy to understand and work with, has a good phone app and it has a limited ‘starter’ edition for just 3 agents which if you’re running a tiny freelance operation like me – is all you need.

(p.s. – all copyrights acknowledged)