This is a subscriber-only article. Join Entrepreneur+ today for access

Learn More

Already have an account?

Sign in
Entrepreneur Plus - Short White
For Subscribers

How One Small Company Outsourced IT to a Cloud-Computing Platform MindShift brings the cloud-computing concept down to earth, so that small firms like Salo can see big IT improvements.

By Jason Ankeny

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Denise Doll-Kiefer used Mindshift to cloud things up at her staffing firm.
Denise Doll-Kiefer used Mindshift to cloud things up at her staffing firm.
Photo© Nancy Kuehn/Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal

There's really no such thing as a typical day at the office for most Salo employees. The majority of staffers rarely set foot inside the firm's downtown Minneapolis headquarters. Salo provides finance, accounting and human resources staffing and placement services to customers across the Twin Cities region, outsourcing workers on a permanent and an interim basis. That means the Salo team exists in a state of near-perpetual motion--a challenging IT proposition even in the age of constant connectivity.

"We're always sending our employees to different client locations, which is very data-intense," says Denise Doll-Kiefer, Salo's chief financial officer. "We were looking at purchasing more servers, but that's not cheap."