Cloud 101

I was speaking to an IT colleague today and he asked me "So what can the cloud bring to small businesses?"

I have to admit, the question blind-sided me. I already take it for granted that everyone can see the same usefulness of the cloud to manage their IT services as I do!

From an end-user point of view, I can guarantee you that your staff are very familiar with cloud architecture and self-service access. How many are using a Google Gmail account or a Microsoft Windows Hotmail account? Are there any staff NOT currently using email in the cloud?

We are so used to the instant gratification of these services that we forget how ubiquitous cloud services have become, and that this has been around for a long time. "Cloud Computing" is simply the latest buzzword - and perhaps the term has added some ambiguity to the concept - so to answer my colleague's question (minus the baffled look!)...

For businesses, renting server real-estate from a service provider, means reducing the servers your business has to manage (and the significant costs surrounding that), with the added bonus of a GREEN solution that saves on space, power and cooling. Phew!

All those costly, essential extras that need to be wrapped around your IT solution - such as anti-virus software, anti-spam software, security management and administration packages and auto-back-ups become the responsibility of the service provider to provide and maintain.

As a minimum expectation, in return for paying a fee based on their usage, businesses can receive negligible downtime, 24/7 availability and access.

Telstra T-suite's 99.9% uptime equates to a 43 minute downtime per month. Compare that to your current service availability.

When renting data storage, the technical capacity of the server is dynamically adjusted to meet your real-time business needs. This is the "elasticity" that the shared hardware model brings. Pay only for what you use - and let the cloud provider work out the load-balancing and scalability issues.

Drawbacks? Yes, there are some. Obviously, the service relies on a reliable internet connection (and we follow the roll out of the National Broadband Network with baited breath!), some organisations are reluctant to pass the security and privacy burden to the service provider, and there is concern that a suitable exit strategy will be made available for data migration out of the service if and when it is no longer required.

There is also the need to configure the out-of-the-box cloud-based service to your unique business needs and the unavoidable cost of training staff on the new delivery method. But these costs will also be incurred if hosting software on-site.

I mentioned (Ok, raved) that Microsoft Exchange - the heart of the Business Productivity Online Suite, bringing email, contacts and calendar access via Outlook 2007/03 (soon to be 2010) or via the web browser - is a significant asset to the small business. In my next post, I will look at that claim in more detail. Feel free to comment!