Recently we have been asked a lot of questions about Cloud Computing. What is it? How does it work? Would it be more cost effective for our business than maintaining our current equipment, software, etc? Would it lower our IT support costs and is it more reliable? What are the security ramifications of having all of your business data offsite in the “Cloud”? >Let me try to answer some of these questions as unbiased as possible.

The definition of Cloud Computing from Wikipedia:

“Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like electricity”.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

In basic terms it means that somewhere outside of your office is a datacenter with lots of servers. These servers offer email, office productivity applications, data storage and web based services to customers around the world for a monthly subscription fee. In most cases you pay by the number of users, the amount of storage or the amount of bandwidth you need. Since you are accessing these resources over your Internet connection they can be anywhere in the world. All you need is an Internet browser and a username and password to access the resource.

Sounds like a really good option and it is for many small businesses.If your company is just starting out and doesn’t have any infrastructure its worth considering. It can be a very cost effective option if you have little start-up capital and can’t afford IT support to build out your servers and network. All you need is an Internet connection and a computer to access the cloud resources. Many of the basic day to day tasks that companies perform can utilize cloud resources such as creating documents or presentations, email or web browsing. If you don’t run any specialized applications or do a lot of document sharing this is a great option. The subscription costs are minimal and you don’t need to purchase or maintain any servers or server applications. No server hardware warranty’s to worry about, security concerns on your local network, data loss due to failed hardware or lack of backups, or software subscriptions or applications to maintain.

An example of a company we assisted in setting this up was a local business with approximately 100 consultants. Since their consultants were all over the country and mainly needed access to a corporate email account we set them up with a Cloud based email service. The consultants connect to a Cloud service to get their email. Its reliable and there is no dependency on a single server in the company’s office. For the few users that collaborate on documents and need access to their accounting software we set up a Cloud server that is hosted in a remote datacenter. The staff has remote access to the system from anywhere and its completely managed and supported by the Cloud hosting provider. A true success story for Cloud Computing.

In my next post I will discuss the reasons why you may not want to use Cloud Computing for your business.