We probably don’t cite the chamber as much as we should but today we are as we attended an event at its headquarters on Premier Boulevard.

This particular seminar was one that might be of interest to small business owners as it was dealing with data storage solutions via the cloud.

While we’re not recommending one company over the other — CenturyLink presented today’s seminar — we believe this seminar is just one of the ways the chamber is trying to look out for the interests of businesses, whether small or large.

CenturyLink representatives discussed the possible cost-savings of storing valuable business data in the cloud rather than having to deal with the expense of servers and losing this data in the event of natural disaster or simply human error.

The cloud is essentially a collection of secured data centers, Internet sites and other digital means of saving data and having instant access to the information whether at home, office or on the road.

It is, CenturyLink engineer Tiffany Huddleston said, a better option than storing information on a flash drive, hard drive or hard drive backup. “Fortunately, if you put it in the cloud, as long as you have got the Internet, you can access from anywhere.”

For small companies, the cloud could be a better than option than trying to maintain an IT staff and for those with an IT staff, “It gives the IT staff back their life. We’re not trying to take anyone’s job,” Huddleston said. “We’re trying to make it more efficient. This is where business is going.”

Attending today’s seminar was interesting to us and while we couldn’t necessarily pull a news story out of it, it’s a good thing to know the local chamber of commerce is looking at existing issues as well as emerging issues that definitely could have a direct impact on business. It is also comforting to know the chamber is looking to add to its lists of accomplishments for the next three years — Editor