A View from the Clouds. So what is computing in the clouds anyway?
January 31st, 2010 | 
Author: Well its 2010 and one of the biggest buzz words this year will be Computing In The Clouds. What is it and what can it do for me you may ask. In this article I will try to give you the pros and cons as I see them. First let us try to get down what the concept is all about. Computing in the clouds is something most of us do already, the best example is Web based email. You don’t have to purchase a email server application or a server computer to host it. Your data and the application is hosted by someone like Google, Hotmail or even AOL. So you log on to your PC and open up internet explorer then log onto your web mail site and bingo you have mail. The new craze is all about making your business applications work in the same way. So what are the disadvantages and advantages of this you ask well below I have listed as many pros and cons for each as I could think of.
Pros
Lower hardware cost due to the fact you won’t need a server on site.
Lower PC system requirements.
Lower on site costs due to the support is all on the hosted server side.
The vendor is responsible for all upgrades to the software and hardware.
Cons
You never really own the software you rent it.
Application Service contracts will start low to entice new users but I expect them to soar after a time and this format becomes more mainstream.
It will be very difficult to change from this platform once you go down this path.
The internet is very unreliable in our region and what this would mean is when your internet connection goes down so will your system (hard to process customer without a working computer these days, give it a try) You can add a second internet connection from a different ISP to help prevent this problem if the outage is cause just by your ISP being down and not the main trunk lines.
Some vendors have you install an emergency server on your site that will cache transactions locally at your site if their servers are down or the internet connection fails. When it comes back online it will sync the two. Looks like we have lost one of the Pros with this option as you now are buying a server and software anyway.
Hosted applications will have a reoccurring monthly or yearly fee along with the initial start up costs.
This is one I would like everyone to think about for a real long time. If your Vendor’s business fails for any reason and they do all the time, how would you get your data back from them and in the event of a bankruptcy could you ever get it back at all? If companies as large as banks and car manufactures can fail small software companies in comparison can and do fail as well.
Many vendors as we all know may not call you back for hours or sometimes days and now your only IT support will be located in some other state. There will not be a option to call someone locally to help get you back on line.
The safety and integrity of your data has always been a key concern, now you would be leaving it up to someone else. It has not been unheard of that even the largest of the cloud computing companies like Microsoft, AOL, Google and Yahoo do at least lose data for a time or even permanently as it has been reported on the news from time to time. Google Danger, the creator of the Sidekick smartphone. They just lost a load of customer data.
Hopefully this will help you make a smarter decision on whether or not cloud computing is a smart choice for your business.
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