Every week, I hear more businesses owners talking about "moving to the cloud." Of course, what that means is open to interpretation. For some, moving to the cloud means signing up for Dropbox or migrating from Outlook to a webmail client. But for the business owners most excited about cloud computing, it's usually migrating their software (and associated data) to an offsite data center—a process commonly referred to software-as-a-service (SaaS).

As a small business owner, it’s easy to lose myself in the daily grind of helping customers, managing employees, and moving from one mini-emergency to the next. It’s hard to find the time to step back and examine some of the less compelling—but just as important—minutiae of running a business.

By Harry Brelsford, Chairman and Founder of SMB Nation, Inc. and Cloud Nation  (First in a series) Overwhelmed. That was my initial reaction to reading the “Drivers & Inhibitors to Cloud Adoption for Small and Midsize Businesses” study released late last week at the invitation-only Microsoft Hosting Summit 2012 and attended by companies such as Parallels. The study, which surveyed over 3,000 small and medium customers (nice sample size BTW) spoke toward several research areas including:

An energetic Daniel Saks recently plead his case for your vote of approval as the white label marketplace of choice for service providers (e.g. SMB Nation tribal members) to get up on the cloud right here, right now. Let’s dig deeper into his assertions that were shared with me at the recent Cloud Fair conference in Seattle.

Long-time friend Stratus, was in Seattle recently at the Cloud Fair conference. I had a chance to catch up with executive Nelson Hsu for coffee.  Hsu shared a bit about Stratus background, stuff I didn’t even know when they were a sponsor at last fall’s conference. Stratus has a 30-year history of providing uptime insurance solutions in the enterprise down to the SMB space. It’s claim the fame is that it’s high availability paradigm is based on purpose-built hardware and software that combined give it resilient technologies according to Hsu. Combine that with proactive monitoring and system management and you have “infrastructure magic” for lack of a better word. So I asked Hsu the obvious question: does he compete with SMB channel favorites Kaseya (who is holding its user conference this week in Vegas – blogs to follow baby!), Level Platforms and Zenith. “No. Think of those RMM tool providers as the “sand” and Stratus is the castle. I am the architect and work closely with the RMM providers.” Hsu stated. “Combined we deliver proactive and predictable alerts.” So how does Stratus play in SMB? Hsu schooled me on Avance, its high-availability software solution completely focused on the SMB segment. It’s is to provide high availability continuous (not failover) service to SMBs that need it. “We serve lawyers, doctors, EMR, manufacturing and MSPs (yes – MSPs themselves). Throw in our work in the public sector and e-commerce and you can see we have a robust portfolio. So the million dollar question is, how much? Well, it’s hardly a million dollars but rather a Avance perpetual license for $100/month for the proactive and monitoring service. Learn more here. Some final thoughts on this privately-held 500+ employee company with a footprint in 40-countries and over 30 Network Operation Centers (NOCs): It has a robust partner program and enjoys the support of many Intel partners. This shouldn’t be a big surprise as some of its funding came from Intel Capital. It’s an Intel Hybrid Cloud Partner and in the AppUp store catalog. Hsu share that this “allows the SMB and VARs to embrace the cloud...to guarantee uptime assurance through a service management partnership such as Stratus" Hsu shared that Stratus see itself as a service provider. “That's what we sell…” KEY TAKEAWAY: Hsu conclude out chat with the following. “We deliver a single pane of glass from a service management perspective - we focus on being the architect. The key thing is it’s a business critical applications that require uptime assurance.  Technology-wise, it’s not exotic...it’s simple and self-managing...no downtime and no data loss.”