There has been growing discussion in the corporate world about cloud services, from Googleโs Docs to Microsoftโs Office 365. Warren Heath explains what choosing the cloud means for your business.
Traditionally, companies have had their email, documents and communication facilities looked after by internal IT departments. This has usually meant dedicating members of staff to maintaining computers in back rooms, preventing everyone losing their email if they break or get turned off. Supporting these, plus the initial cost of setting them up, can be prohibitive, or at least expenditure that a company would like to avoid. To meet this need, IT providers have been getting their heads together to come up with a wayto offer these requirements and solutions without being forced to compromise on price. The solution thatโs being presented is โthe cloudโ.
The applications on offer arenโt anything new. Facebook is a cloud solution for messaging, picture sharing and event organisation, while millions of people use Hotmail or Gmail for their personal email, along with services such as Imgur or Photobucket to digitally store pictures. These are all cloud services with which we are familiar and that have historically been paid for with advertising revenue.
While they previously havenโt been considered serious enough for businesses to incorporate into their day-to-day usage, the cost of on-site IT equipment is no longer something companies wish to bear. Corporations such as Microsoft and Google are willing to provide data storage and processing power for businesses to store their own documentation on a mass level.
The benefit for a company is the savings made from no longer having to maintain its own servers. Cloud services can be set up on a one-to-one basis for small companies, or can scale up to hundreds of people, all accessing information that is being kept on the hostโs main servers.
Having information hosted off-site means that companies pass on the responsibility for making that data available to employees and can focus on aspects of the business more important to them. This has proven to be a very attractive prospect and has fuelled the focus on cloud solutions.
Disadvantages are that as cloud services are often run on a subscription model, the cost of keeping them up and running over the life of a business may be more than if a company had kept the IT provision in-house. There are also some concerns about where data is located. Due to compliance regulations for some businesses, storing information on a third partyโs machines isnโt possible, so to create a completely cloud-hosted system, policy changes would need to be made. However, for many the ubiquitous access to their company information more than outweighs this.
Renting cloud storage also comes with its own hazards if something goes wrong. If your provider is having issues with its data centre, the voice you carry as one small business means you may not get the service you expect. For some this is an acceptable trade-off, as problems that affect a number of companies will get fixed quickly. A small problem only affecting your business, however, may not receive the same level of attention. This can be mitigated by working with a provider who can group your account in with other businesses, thus pooling your impact.
Overall, the development of cloud offerings and their prevalence in the market has allowed businesses the choice to run their IT needs off-site. When carried out and delivered properly, the services provide the ability to pull a document from your phone in seconds, or to be able to work on any machine with an internet connection. In a climate of global business, this is a vital feature.
Warren Heath is IT Service Desk Supervisor at Wirebird.
