For this Infomentary we asked Andrew Jaquith, CTO at IBM Business Partner Perimeter E-Security, how small businesses can leverage the cloud.

Jaquith says cloud services enable small businesses to get rid of things that might be weighing them down, particularly essential parts of their business that they don’t necessarily need to experts in. After all, most everyday people don’t do their own electrical work or plumbing–for these are complex and expensive problems that require professional expertise—so why would companies spend time building their own hosted email, sales automation, or data storage? They don’t want to spend the time, says Jaquith, “they simply want it to work.” That, he says, is what the cloud does for small business.