Prospero is a set of financial services by SAGE. Now available in SaaS format, the pay-per-use version of the tool set offers a cost-effective, customizable and easily installable option for financial institutions and smaller start-up companies alike. You can gain access to Prospero in a variety of places, worldwide, including Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

For some companies like Oracle, ascent into the cloud has proven turbulent; Sage, however, has met with nothing but success.

One of the specific advantages to Prospero is that it allows clients their choice regarding whether they want to configure their system for on-site processing, whether they want it done remotely on SAGE's secure, Switzerland-based servers, or some combination.

Since all the hardware Prospero requires in order to render its services are administered and maintained remotely, the clients who use the programs tools will have no need to hire an IT department in order to maintain the involved systems. Access to this set of tools will minimize the amount of energy and money you must invest in systems management, freeing you to do the job for which your company is built: managing finances.

Using other, similar systems, start-ups need to invest a large sum of money up front during the initial planning stages in order to set up a hardware configuration and data storage system with little or no guarantee with regard to whether they will actually need it, and to what extent. Using Prospero, a start-up can choose one particular tool they find useful and then continue to add more comprehensive services as the business grows and develops.

With Prospero, you buy access to individual tools, and if you find that you do not require them, you may simply cancel services. Should you discover that you need other, different tools, it is equally as easy to sign up to receive those, instead. No matter how large your company becomes, Prospero system access can expand to accommodate it.

Unsurprisingly, the ad copy available on Prospero’s site regarding the issue of security remains somewhat limited. The truth is that security on cloud-based systems is a highly nuanced concept. In one regard, yes, a large and well-known company such as SAGE will no doubt hold their systems to a much higher level of security than what most small business could manage to provide for their employees' desktop and laptop systems.

On the other hand, as Mashable Business’s Todd Wasserman argues, if your cloud-based system does fail for some reason, you will have the distinct displeasure of watching your entire business grind to an unceremonious halt until systems are restored. A technical failure on a hardware-based system is less likely to cause a stink nearly as pervasive or pungent.