Cloud computing and your business
You’ve probably heard the phrase “Cloud computing” being used in technology circles for a while now. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, cloud computing simply means that instead of having your software and data on your hard-drive, it’s located on a bunch of servers somewhere in the ‘cloud’. Your interaction with software is primarily conducted through your web browser and you access the software and your data through the Internet. (you can go here for a more detailed Wikipedia explanation)
Cloud computing in its rawest sense is not a new idea. If you had a Hotmail email account when it first launched years ago, you were an early adopter of cloud computing. After webmail, the next step in cloud computing was web photo-sharing. Web photo-sharing allowed you to upload your images to a server somewhere and display them without forcing you to learn how to create a webpage in HTML. Web photo-sharing was a big step in helping democratize photography, as it made it easy for people to share their photos with friends and family.
While email and web photo-sharing were the first cloud computing services, cloud computing wasn’t much of a hot topic until more recent times. It can be argued that the real fanfare over cloud computing truly began when commercially-focused pieces of software migrated to the ‘cloud’. The advent of Salesforce.com placed a spotlight on the promise of cloud computing to improve employee efficiency and productivity by providing them easy access to important information, at any time of the day. Salesforce.com’s online CRM offering led the way to prominence for other ‘cloud’ enterprise, productivity and storage offerings such as Netsuite (an Enterprise Resource Planning app), 37 Signals’s suite of software, Google Apps, Zoho and even Lenovo’s Online Data Backup service.
The advantages of cloud computing for a small business are manifold.
1. Low cost: Cloud computing software companies charge a small monthly subscription fee instead of large per seat licenses. Now, instead of needing a large sum of money for capital expenditure, you’ve turned your software into a monthly operating expense, helping you lower your capital financing needs. In the event you don’t like the software, you can simply cancel your subscription and take a loss only on a month’s worth of subscription fees.
2. Device independence: You’re not tied to a specific computing device, since all you need to run the software is a web browser. Use your smartphone, desktop, notebook or netbook on operating systems as diverse as Mac OS X and Linux to conduct business. Small businesses that don’t have a big IT budget can use a “bring what you got” approach to run their business.
3. Anytime, anywhere access: Since your files are stored in the ‘cloud’, you can work on them even if you’re not close to your primary PC. You can leave your computer at home when you’re traveling and use a friend’s laptop or use the desktop at the library to do some work.
4. Automatic backups: Cloud computing companies may provide multiple levels of redundancy to ensure that data you store in the cloud is safe. Data backups are automatic, and while you may pay for storage in the cloud, you don’t have to buy backup software and extra hard disk drives to store your data.
5. Automatic and transparent software updates: You don’t have to spend your hard-earned money upgrading your software every so often, or bite your nails as you upgrade your software to the latest version, hoping that the upgrade doesn’t cause any instabilities or crashes in your system. Cloud-based software will update itself without you telling it to do so. The only time you’ll notice is when you see the nifty new feature you’ve been requesting for months suddenly appear in your browser.
6. Email-less collaboration: Some cloud-based software such as Google Docs and 37 Signals’s suite allow you to collaborate in real time without having to email files back and forth to each other. Changes you make are updated immediately, eliminating the lag time between when you complete your edits or changes and when your business partner or employee has access to those updates. Add VoIP or video chats to the mix and you have a great collaboration platform.
7. Security: Since your application and data files aren’t on your hard disk, the threat of viruses, trojans and worms corrupting your important information decreases significantly. You can now entrust your data to enterprise-class security, without spending the dollars to do so.
Cloud computing promises a lot of great things, but there are reasons why it has yet to become more prevalent. Here are some of the things I believe will need to exist in order for cloud computing to take off.
1. Ubiquitous connectivity: Since all interactions happen through the Internet, being connected is a fundamental requirement for cloud computing to become successful. With the proliferation of smartphones and mobile broadband on notebooks and netbooks, we are making major strides towards realizing the positives of cloud computing.
2. 99.9999% Reliability: If you’re accustomed to your software always doing what you want it to do, you may occasionally be frustrated when your cloud-based software is down, even for a few minutes. The reality is that though not all cloud-based software suffers from any appreciable downtime, some do, and until everyone’s software works as consistently as their hard-drive-based counterparts, en masse adoption of cloud computing will not happen.
3. Offline capability: While you may be connected to the Internet most of the time, there will be times when poor WiFi or cell reception will force you to work on a local copy of your files. Being able to work on your files while you’re not connected is an important requirement for widespread adoption of cloud-computing. Thankfully, technologies such as Adobe Air and Google Gears enable offline use of cloud-based software.
Cloud computing is changing the way we perceive software, allowing us to work and collaborate in ways we could never have done in the past. The addition of value-add, secondary services that are attached to cloud-based software and services changes that paradigm even more. I believe that the move to an all-Internet based software environment for most business software is imminent. Perhaps you’re an early adopter and have already made the switch completely. I’d appreciate it if you’d take the poll below and share your thoughts on cloud-based computing in the comments section.
P.S. This is a list of cloud-based software that I’ve personally found useful.
TO DO LIST: Remember the Milk – www.rememberthemilk.com
PROJECT MANAGEMENT: Basecamp from 37 Signals – www.37signals.com
CRM, including Inventory Management: ZOHO CRM – www.zoho.com/crm
PERSONAL FINANCE: Mint – www.mint.com
March 18th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Great info Brandon!
March 18th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Cloud computing is evil! It’s anti computing, and will lead to corporate slavery!
March 24th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Hugo, interesting claim. Can you expand a little on your statement?
March 31st, 2009 at 8:00 am
If Hugo can’t/doesn’t, I will:
Where security of data has always been one of the most important goals in IT, companies don’t seem to care to give it up, if it is for a fancy buzzword.
All the confusion what “Cloud Computing” really means aside – one thing is absolutely clear: if you use it, all data you give to the cloud isn’t your data anymore.
You can’t know where it is, you can’t know who has access, you can’t know what happens with it. You can’t even make sure that data is gone if you delete it. Even Google (who claims stricter policies than most other “cloud”-companies) states that deleted data may remain up to 3 weeks “in the cloud” (whatever that means, like I explained above).
All that stands between your data, its security, its privacy and its existence is a 10 – 1000 lines privacy agreement. A legal necessity, nothing more and nothing less.
So: if you want to get your data out without knowing what happens to it, send it in the cloud!
April 26th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
I’m late reading this post, Brandon — having just discovered you last week!
I agree with most of the positives you gave in favor of cloud-computing. So my question, as an old debate coach taught me, is whether you can also lay out for us the negatives. The dangers in fact and how to safely operate within that framework.
There’s still a lingering, Orwellian feel to “cloud” computing that troubles me — some irrational fear of “information harvesting” or “information hijacking?” Not sure what it is that still hangs me up, but maybe you do and might talk about it in a future column?
April 27th, 2009 at 11:34 am
thomasg, Hugo and Elaine, thank you for your comments! I agree with you that cloud computing is definitely not nirvanic and that there are fears and concerns about its use that are extremely valid. In the interest of fair and balanced assessment, I will give this hot topic its due diligence and outline the negatives in an ensuing post.
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:30 am
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
July 8th, 2009 at 10:00 am
[...] improvements, making customers the winners. In a previous article on Roaring Mouse, I argued that cloud computing and a move to an all-Internet based software environment for most business software …. This announcement is a major step toward making that claim a [...]