We hear questions like “should we move our operations to the cloud” regularly, so today we’re going to explain what “the cloud” really means for you and your business.
Cloud computing is a catch-all term for services like hosted email (Gmail, hosted Exchange) and hosted applications (Salesforce.com) where you don’t need to know the physical location of the servers. The servers are not in your office; they reside in a datacenter across the country. They are “in the cloud” because you connect to them via the Internet.
For many companies it is a financial decision whether to move to the cloud or not. If it saves significant money, consider it. However, if the costs are close, like moving to the cloud for $10,000 versus keeping it in house for $8,000, then keep it in house. Either way our competent IT professionals will provide you with ubiquitous access to your data.
When your information is “in the cloud”, everything you do has to travel back and forth between your computer and “the cloud” and you are limited by the speed of your Internet connection.
Internet connections run at a fraction of LAN speeds and are shared with everyone in the office, so the connection can get saturated pretty quickly. When your files are large or when your business applications are competing with personal streaming applications like online radio, YouTube, and Facebook, this can be a real problem.
Finally, Internet connectivity itself can be a problem. Access to your data is dependent on the connection, so when it is down, no one can get anything done.
Many people want to move to the cloud because larger companies, like Google or Microsoft, seem competent at what they do. In-house servers often seem like too much of a headache when you’re not as big as Google. The truth is fantastic service comes from competent IT people who care about you and your business.
If we do our job right, you’ll never see us, you’ll always have access to your files anywhere in the world at any time of the day, any day of the week, just as magically as if moved “to the cloud”. The difference with GroundForce IT is you’ll have a real live contact point from a local company you know and trust.