With all the hype around the cloud and the benefits of cloud computing, probably the single most compelling reason more and more small businesses are moving parts of their network to the cloud is - no surprise - to lower their IT costs.
Not only can you save money on software licenses, but hardware (servers and workstations) as well as in IT support and up-grades. Since the cloud uses a ‘pay as you go’ model, you no longer have to maintain software licenses for every seat in your company instead you pay a monthly fee and only pay for what you use. For some companies this model can provide a significant savings in software costs.
The ‘pay as you go’ model is also ideal for fast growth companies or companies that need to scale their workforce significantly for new projects. Instead of having to secure software licenses for contract workers, you simply increase the number of users in the cloud. Similarly once the project is over, you can reduce the number of users in the cloud.
Another area of savings is hardware. Most servers come with a 3 year warranty. After 3 years it is typically more expensive to maintain the old server versus leasing or buying a new one. Like a car, it can be more expensive to keep an old car running than buy or lease a new one.
There is also an opportunity to save in IT support and up-grades as the software and server will be maintained by the cloud provider and included in the fee you will pay them for their services.
While there are many areas of savings, in particular if you hate constantly writing big, fat checks for IT upgrades, you’ll really want to look into cloud computing.
If you're a business owner and you'd like to get more information on cloud computing you can download a free report at http://www.ciolanding.com/resources/free-cloud-report/ or you can sign up for an Executive Cloud Computing webinar on June 27 at 11am. To sign up go to www.CIOLanding.com/CloudWebinarSignup
What if they decide to go out of business and give no notice? What if their service goes down? What if your internet service goes down? What if something happens to the Internet between you and the cloud provider? I don't recommend that any of my customers put anything mission-critical into the cloud, unless they own and operate it themselves.
As for the internet going down, while people often say that a limitation of the cloud is that you have to have an internet connection, given the ubiquity of internet access, this is not much of a limitation. Why? Because if internet access fails in one location, it can be easily accessed in another location or through another network. You can improve the reliability of your internet connection by having multiple internet connections and a way to balance your cloud services traffic over them. If you have more than one internet service provider in your area, then you can get additional internet connections. For some businesses, the marginal cost of adding a second or third internet connection is outweighed by the inconvenience and loss of service from not being connected when your internet service is down.
Most cloud vendors take security very seriously and the best have a small army of PHD's working to secure their networks. Think about it, their business and their reputation depend on their network's security and availability. They have much more invested in network security than the typical small to medium business, to make their online data more secure than a local version. What if my cloud provider goes out of business? Though highly unlikely, if a cloud provider shuts down, there should be enough notice to extract your data prior to a total system shutdown. Most cloud vendors provide a method for you to export your data or return it to you. Check with the vendor prior to signing up and make sure this is the case.
Thanks for the info. We've not had that experience with our clients. To date we have only worked with Tier 1 cloud service providers who have redundancy built into their operations. Agree this is definately something to understand and evalute when choosing a provider.
Amazon is arguably a Tier 1 provider and they've had outages. Again, if the cloud is off-premise and being maintained/operated by someone else and they forget something, or something else goes awry, what's it going to take to resolve the issue? What's the impact to your business? You can also have redundancy on your Internet links away from your local loop, and I've seen problems STILL happen. Routers are computing devices that are subject to all the crazy issues that crop up in computing from time-to-time, and I can't even count the number of times I've seen routers start flapping rather than updating their routes appropriately, and until the network guys started talking and tracerouting - things were down and it wasn't even the fault of anyone we had any control over - just an interconnecting link we happened to hop through...