There is such a thing as a free lunch, and when you start using open-source software you can probably throw in breakfast and a late night snack as well. But can you really run your small business in the cloud for nothing?

I have been using free or open-source desktop software for some time now, and know many a small business which does exactly the same. However, transferring that concept of ‘free is good’ to incorporate cloud computing for business has been a much harder sell.

I recall one small business client literally laughing in my face when I suggested that a ‘free cloud infrastructure model’ might be the way forward for his just-the-two-of-us company on a limited budget. He stopped laughing when he received my invoice, of course, but that’s a different story altogether.

The point being that this guy, like many others, missed the point: low-cost and no-cost does not have to equate to doing business on the cheap. Which led me to thinking, isn’t it time we stopped automatically adopting a ‘you get what you pay for’ mentality and instead seriously started considering that a free lunch might not taste so bad after all?

The real beauty of using a free online infrastructure such as the Google cloud is that as well as being inexpensive, it’s also as simple to set up and maintain as you can possibly get. Ticking two out of the three ‘most important requirement’ boxes for the majority of my consultancy clients in one easy strike: cost and simplicity. The third, by the way, is security.

Aha! I hear you cry, we have found the Achilles’ heel of your argument. But, I’m not sure that’s the case. Your level of security does not automatically increase with the amount of money you throw at the problem. At the smallest of small businesses level, the part-time and working from home loner, the installation of a completely free internet security come antivirus solution can work just as well, if not better, than a fully blown commercial offering. They keep the computer free of infection without impacting upon system performance courtesy of a lack of bells and whistles. However, moving up to slightly larger small businesses, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t let someone else throw money at the security issue and then benefit from that investment for nothing.

That is, essentially, what happens when you take advantage of something like Google’s cloud implementation with services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites. With a ‘Standard’ Google Apps account all these are free, for up to 50 users, yet your data isn’t stored in creaky shed out the back while ‘Premier’ customers only get into the tightly locked-down data centre.

Google has invested big time in both physical and process-based security, meaning the data centres are nicely hardened using things such as biometric access controls and multi-tiered security perimeters. A multi-layered security process protocol is used to protect your data, and these processes are audited to ensure data confidentiality, integrity and availability. Google applies synchronous replication of data activity across apps so as to simultaneously preserve that data in multiple secure data centres – meaning if one is unavailable another kicks in as a fallback.

As someone who talks to numerous small businesses about their data security arrangements, I am starting to come to the conclusion that storing data in the cloud is less of a concern than storing it on a series of unsecured thumb drives or netbooks, which almost inevitably get lost at some point. Think of it as putting your money in the bank rather than under the bed at home.

The free cloud isn’t for everyone, I readily admit, but it’s one of those things to which the newly invented (by me) online law of inverse business benefit applies: the smaller your business is the bigger the advantages become.