To the Cloud! – Part 1, What is it?

To the Cloud! – Part 1, what is it?

“TO THE CLOUD!” Everyone has seen the commercial or heard the phrase, but do you really know what this often misused phrase refers to? Most of us use the cloud in our daily lives but have little knowledge of what it truly means.  Cloud computing refers to using  software and applications over the Internet rather than from a hard drive on a local PC or server.

Still confused?  Let me provide a common example that we see amongst our clients.
A popular mail server is Microsoft’s Exchange server.  Traditionally, if you wanted to have email, shared calendaring and more sophisticated mail functions, you would have to buy
a robust server and license and load MS Exchange on the server.  It would probably be that loud machine stuffed in a closet in your back office somewhere.  It is a significant up-front investment and means you will also have on-going support costs.  The new “cloud” alternative is to migrate the Exchange email (along with calendar items and perhaps documents) to a hosted service such as Google Apps for Business or Microsoft’s Office 365.  In this scenario, the business does not have to make a capital investment in servers and hardware; they just pay per user, per year.  Meanwhile, the user may have no idea that their mail is being provided from “the cloud”, in that they still use it as they did when they had an internal server.  They also may have more options for getting to their email and calendars from more places, such as home or even Starbucks; any place where they can get an Internet connection.

A number of small businesses have taken the leap from on premise computing to the cloud. One third of small/mid-sized businesses (SMB) have adopted some form of cloud
computing.  They have taken their email, calendars, and/or documents to the cloud. Company employees now have access to their important information wherever there is an Internet connection.  Of these early adopters, 98% have said their cloud experience has been positive or very positive and has produced the desired results.

What does the future hold for the cloud and SMB’s?  Another third of SMB’s predict moving to the cloud in the next year.

- EasyIT

P.S. Be on the lookout for “To the Cloud – Part 2, private versus public cloud”

All numbers were based on the survey done by CompTIA.