Cloud
Ode to the “Cloud”
Wed, 07/07/2010 - 04:54 | 
admin
A few months ago I posted an entry about cloud computing. Since then there have been lots of start ups and lots of new services provided by some of the old players, like Microsoft and Google, the latter needed no mention here but what’s done is done, needless to say for small businesses and even larger organizations these services allow you conduct business in ways you never have before.
While I have been keeping tabs as best I could on the progress of various cloud services, and believe me at this point there are way too many for just one person to keep track of, I also took the time to test a few of them to determine whether they may have a place in KCCS and/or can be recommend to our customers for use. Now before I continue this post I should probably admit a few things,
- I am still not drinking the Cool Aid
- I still love traditional desktop/ server applications
Recently I made a big push to move our most common used applications to a cloud version or a cloud alternative. For example things like CRM, Support Ticketing, Invoicing and even Project management, as a result we are about 90% cloud based. But being the none trusting type there is also a traditional application on our servers that serve the same purpose and before you point out the fact that it just doubles the workload I will say this, most of the services we use also integrate in some way with our desktop applications like Office, meaning that changes made using either the cloud of the desktop application will reflect on the other.
To give you a general insight to what I am referring to I will give a break down of what service we use and how we use them.
Tags: Virtualization Vs, Cloud Computing
Sun, 10/04/2009 - 03:10 | admin
These days the biggest buzzwords in the IT industry have been the expansion of Cloud computing and the major push towards virtualizing the traditional computing infrastructure. But with these two new concepts come questions from business owners like you and me and the biggest question without a doubt has to be “which one is better?” or “which should i use?” While there is no one answer that can work for everyone I will say this, for some things it maybe better in the long run for certain services to be outsourced to cloud providers. One such things would be storage especially back up storage. There tons backup providers out there, for instance, Carbonite, Mozy and some ISPs are now providing backup services. However the other services seem to have limitations, for example Google Docs work great for simple documents and make it real easy to share those file, Microsoft also has a similar service called office live, and while this is a bit more robust than the Google alternative allowing you to create and/or edit files in your traditional Office applications and via the Office Live plug-in you can save it to you cloud account which like Google give you about 5gig of storage, which is pretty modest I must say. In the the end I still don’t think the various technologies have evolved enough to a serious consideration at this point, even though it may have its merits the price of small business servers including second hand or whitebox servers not to mention the fact that users will need to be able to get on the internet at all times limits the use for now until offline editing becomes more prevalent.
