Aside from being the hot topic of 2011, the phrase Cloud Computing has to be the single most misused and misunderstood of all time. According to Wikipedia, cloud computing is “…a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources”. Easy, huh?

In real terms, Cloud Computing can be compared to an electricity supply. You want power? Turn on a switch. As the consumer, you don’t need to worry about how the power is being generated, where the power station is, if it has enough capacity, and so on. And you certainly don’t need to own your own power station to generate the electricity you use. All of that is someone else’s problem; you simply pay for what you use.

Cloud Computing in the true sense of the word is the same. Need another email address? No problem, here you go, that’s $9.95 per month please. No need to purchase the email server to host it on, no need to make sure you’ve purchased enough licenses from Microsoft, and no need to have an email server sitting in your office.

Now Cloud Computing is nothing new. Think of services such as Hotmail, and Gmail. Perfect examples of Cloud Computing that we’re all familiar with. Need a Hotmail account? Easy, go sign up. Does Hotmail have enough server capacity for your new account? Not your problem. Back in the heady days of the dot com boom, Cloud Computing was called ASP (Application Service Provision), but back then the idea was ahead of the technology and it didn’t really stick. This time though, it’s here to stay. The technology is now up to the task of delivering on the promise, with more Cloud based services arriving every day. Check out http://www.37signals.com/ for some great examples of powerful business applications made available under a cloud model.

Cloud Computing sounds great, and to listen to the marketers you’d think it was the silver bullet to solve all computing problems. As always with such promises, the reality doesn’t always meet the expectations. For starters you will continue to need IT support (and we’re not just saying that so you’ll keep us around). Just because the email server (to continue our example) isn’t in your office, your computers still need to be managed, accounts created and removed, and so on. The other important point to consider is the safety and security of your information, and reliability of the cloud you are depending on. Horror stories regularly emerge of businesses losing their vital information because a cloud provider suffered a major failure, or of services being offline and unavailable for extended periods. Even Microsoft have had some well publicised challenges keeping their own cloud offering online.

Cloud Computing is an exciting part of the technology landscape that may be able to help your business reduce costs and improve services in some cases, but it may not be appropriate in all situations. Grassroots IT is experienced in analysing business needs and assessing the viability of cloud based services for your business. If you think your business may benefit, talk to us today.