James Kim is a writer for Choosewhat.com, which provides product reviews and test data for business services and products. Choosewhat.com’s goal is to help small companies make informed buying decisions on business solutions that help their business.

Going viral is no longer an option — for many businesses it’s a requirement. More and more companies are shifting from physical to virtual entities. While people have debated whether this is a good or bad thing, this shift has brought a vast array of useful, cloud-based tools for entrepreneurs. From online fax to finances, there are now plenty of online services that can help you make your business more efficient. So what are you waiting for? Try out these online business tools.

1. Collaboration

As a CEO of a small-business, you may have to forego office space in the beginning phases of company development. However, these online communication services can help you stay in touch, regardless of geographic distance.

In-Company Communication

• Campfire: Offers private chat rooms, through which you can invite clients or employees
• GoogleDocs and ConceptShare: Share or comment on documents
• Skype: Free video chats and low-cost calls to landline and cell phones, easy open communication

Call Services

• RingCentral Fax: Provides online fax services, through which you can send faxes for free from home without interrupting your phone line
• GoogleVoice: Allows you to get low rates for international calls, and gives you one number for all of your phones with a single voicemail box
• NewVoiceMedia: Contact center solutions including call routing and CRM

2.  Organization

Juggling all the elements of a business can be enough to make a person go insane. Lucky for you, there are plenty of online services that help you tackle this difficult task.

Calendars and Planners

• GoogleCalendar: Calendar tool
• Skedgeme: Scheduling, allows you to accept/make appointments, and customers can see services and book online

File Backup

• Carbonite and IDrive: Offer unlimited backup plans at affordable prices, and allows you to access your information from mobile devices
• Box.net: Backup and collaboration at affordable prices for monthly plans
• DropBox: Allows the sharing/storage of large files

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

• Highrise: Helps keep track of customers, contact and communication history
• Commence: Quote based cost, has one system for sales, marketing and customer service

3.  Finances

It’s always good to utilize a program that will organize all your transactions, assets, and finances. These programs can help you do just that.

• Dimewise or Wesabe: Record transactions
• Prosper: Allows you to get loans from either a single person or many individuals

Thanks to online services, maintaining a business has never been easier. Access everything you need from your computer or, if your on-the-move, from your mobile device with cloud computing services.

Cloud computing has provided the means for us to instantly share pictures with friends on Flickr or Facebook, have conversations on Twitter, and post blogs for the whole world to read on Wordpress. Thanks to Google’s Gmail, being able to access your email anywhere you have a connection to the internet and having more inbox space than most people will use in a lifetime has become the norm. We can even draft and share documents online  thanks to Google Apps.

But what happens when the unthinkable happens? When there is a glitch in the cloud or you accidentally delete something and are the victim of lost data that cannot be recovered and has floated away. We have seen examples of this such as T-Mobile Sidekick owners losing their contacts, calendars, and photos on the Windows Mobile platform. Just last week, social media giant Facebook, had its worst outage since only having 7 million users. The remedy was to actually temporarily turn off the database for many of the 500 million users.

It’s easy to forget a time not too long ago where we were responsible for backing-up our own data on our computers. This may have meant periodically burning your files onto a DVD or backing them up to an external USB drive you kept in a safe place for your piece of mind. With cloud computing, we give up some control. That philosophy wasn’t accepted by the founders at Backupify. They still wanted the same piece of mind for their social media and online documents that they got from backing up their computer to an external USB drive.

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