DO YOU TRUST THE CLOUD?
By Peter Horewitch, President, Common Knowledge Technology
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Cloud computing is rapidly gaining steam, especially among small and mid sized businesses which have the ability to quickly change and adapt to new cost-effective technologies. Haven’t heard of cloud computing? At its most basic level, it is simply hosting a technology service from outside your office. It could be an application such as e-mail, or an entire server. But how do you know if you should jump on the band wagon?
There are certainly pros and cons to putting your data in the cloud. You don’t provide the electricity or water that you use in your business, why provide your own servers? Although electricity is critical to running your business, it does not define your business. Its readily available to everyone. This is a good rule of thumb in deciding when you should take advantage of the cloud. Any intellectual property or proprietary process that defines your business, provides differentiation or competitive advantage, is not a good candidate for putting into the cloud.
On the flip side, things like e-mail that have become nearly as common place as electricity are great opportunities to put into the cloud. When using an outsourced infrastructure from the likes of Microsoft, Google or Amazon, you are tapping into a world class data center. The efficiencies of scale that they offer allow you to maintain a huge e-mail box for just a couple bucks per month. The data center has protection and redundancy, business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities the likes of your business will probably never be able to achieve on its own.
As you tackle more grey areas such as applications, you face more complex issues. My own company outsources our time and billing system. We have freed ourselves from the problems of growing data, upgrades and maintenance. However, we bear risks such as the hosting company going out of business and not being able to access our data. Even a subsidiary of Microsoft almost lost all the data for SideKick mobile phone users last year. While these risks are usually small and not necessarily insurmountable, they certainly need to be understood and mitigated where appropriate.
Think cloud computing is new? Well, that AOL account you had back in the day technically was in the cloud too. We just didn’t have the puffy white picture painted at the time. These are well established technologies which have been fueled in part by the explosion of readily available cheap bandwidth. If you haven’t taken a look at cloud computing, its time to sit down and evaluate your options. Ask yourself what computing needs do I have that are really utilities in nature, and let someone who is more experienced at providing utilities take on that role. In some cases, especially start-ups, that may be your entire technology infrastructure. But in most cases, leave the rest in house for now as the market continues to mature.
Author Credit: Peter Horewitch, Common Knowledge Technology, LLC www.CK-Tek.com |
