Archive for the ‘Cloud Computing’ Category
If the traffic growth to this website is any indication, online backup is fast becoming an accepting service offering for home as well as small businesses. The question is why now?
There are probably several answers to this question. The first is that in an economic climate where we are all waiting around for businesses around us to fall over, everyone is looking for ways to secure their data with the least expensive way possible without compromising on security.
The thing is, for most small businesses, PC backup is either something they have never done before, or something that currently involves tapes or external hard drives being locked up in the safe or the boot of your car.
Both of these alternatives are quite time consuming and carry their own suite of risks, not to mention costs. With the recent fires here is Victoria, many small businesses have had a wake-up call as to the real threat that a natural or even man-made disaster can be to a business (I am not referring to physical shop or furnishings).
So in short, online backup is getting more attention by the press and the consumer because the market is looking for alternatives that are simple and cost effective.
The second reason for the growing popularity of online backup is that the market is becoming far more accepting of what cloud computing can actually do. There have been several high profile providers of online backup that have already fallen by the way side. Maybe the solution wasn’t right or they were ahead of their time. Today’s consumer is however more ready than ever for cloud computing and services such as Google’s Gmail and Docs have better conditioned them for it. Just as importantly, the internet is playing such a key role in our home and business lives that we have accepted the fact that a good part of our lives is and always will be online.
Carbonite has been around for several years now and importantly it has significant financial backing behind it. But it’s not just the backing that makes the operation secure, it’s actually got a real and growing client base of over 600,000 paying customers (not free users). Add to this the fact that its product range is also growing. There was the launch of the Mac version in April and later this year we will see the much anticipated SMB version.
What we (Carbonite Australia) have found to date is that a lot of our interest is coming from small business owners who are realising that their data is critical and that it actually lives on their PC not in the filing cabinet. For some it’s a risk, when you compare it to using traditional backup such as hard drives, but at $72, its worth the risk at least for a year. Most admit that they are curious and want to try it. I dare say that at some stage during the subscription, they will need to do even a basic restore, so they should get their monies worth.
We believe that online storage and backup has a great future in Australia and at the price point that we compete in ($6 per month for backing up your PC’s hard drive) you would be pressed to find a better remote backup solution.
For those still hesitant we offer a free 30 day trial. The June issue of PC Authority has a free 6 month trial, which is plenty of time to try it and like or dislike it.
The future of cloud computing for the everyday small business is definitely here.
For those seeking greater clarification about the future of cloud computing, The Age’s Technology section ran an interesting article today about the centralisation of computer systems. It explained that before computers become available, mainframes where what people had access to they used to share them because of their sheer cost to buy them. This meant that computer processing was very central.
With the invention and access to the personal computer, these systems and data were eventually decentralised. Companies held their information locally. This is where we are today, most businesses today continue to store their data locally in their own data centre.
With ‘cloud computing’ becoming more of an accepted practice each day, we are heading back to that centralised model. Companies are opting to have part of their computer systems hosted offsite. Be this software or data. Truth being however that it is very early days and lots of sceptics.
The article makes an interesting analogy about some of the scepticisms surrounding “cloud computing”
There are of course many sceptics. That is in the nature of any new technology. I still run across people who say they’re not happy putting their applications and data out there in “the cloud”. Typically they cite security concerns or a feeling of uncertainty or lack of control.
Yet we all feel OK giving our money to the bank for safekeeping (well, most of us, most of the time). There is nothing intrinsically different about information – indeed, in today’s world, money is no more than a type of data. Attitudes will change.
Carbonite falls into the category of cloud computing because it enables the user to store a backup of their data offsite in a central data centre. So instead of holding the backup locally eg in a hard drive in the safe, the backup data is trusted with Carbonite.
Carbonite is not a storage solution as such, but for many smaller businesses out there looking for a cost effective and automated backup solution, the future is already here.
You can find the article here.
By David Friend - Chairman & CEO Carbonite, Inc
It’s been ten years since the last Internet bubble, so I guess it’s about time for another orgy of earth – shaking industry hype. The words “cloud computing” were referred to in an email I got recently from Motley Fool as “The two words Bill Gates doesn’t want you to hear…” PC Magaine asked rhetorically, “Is cloud computing the next big thing?” Business Week ran an article called “Computing Heads for the Clouds.” And Forbes ran a piece that predicted “The Death of Hardware.” The International Herald Tribune ran a piece on Google’s new data center in Oregon, describing it ominously as “looming like an information-age nuclear plant.” Nicholas Carr, writing in the Harvard Business Review, goes on to say “Rendered obsolete, the traditional PC is replaced by a simple terminal — a “thin client” that’s little more than a monitor hooked up to the Internet.”
I’m the CEO of a company whose product is frequently cited as the poster child for cloud computing, or more specifically “software as a service” (SaaS). Carbonite, as a leading provider of automated online backup for consumers and small businesses, keeps everything in the cloud. So I believe in cloud computing. But when I see investment advisory newsletters telling me, “But in order to claim your fair share of the wealth, you have to know who the dominant players are – and you have to get invested now,” I wonder what they’ve been inhaling.
The Internet really was a revolution. Before I had a DSL connection, I had no Internet. After I got DSL I had Internet. Is was a binary before/after proposition. A thin client computer is still a computer. It is not a monitor, as in the old green screen variety. It still has to have all the computing horsepower needed for graphics rendering, and more. Maybe it doesn’t need a hard drive because storage can be done on the network. But it’s definitely not some great revolutionary breakthrough. Nor is doing what Google’s doing with their giant data centers – searching through billions of documents in a flash – much more than an evolutionary step from shared database applications that have been running on mainframes, and then servers, for decades. It’s not the cloud computing that’s bringing in the money, it’s the advertising, of course. Now with so many people connected to the Internet, companies like Google find ways to provide useful services, such as general information searches, that bring eyeballs to the screens of millions of PCs. And you know the rest.
What is new, but not all that revolutionary in my opinion, is doing more of the computing on the server and less on the PC. But again, this is not revolutionary, but rather evolutionary. If you wanted to do word processing, you used to go to a retail store and buy a CD with Microsoft Word on it, for instance. Then, with the Internet, you could download the whole thing and install it. Now with Google Apps, you can actually do your word processing online without downloading software. Or that’s how it appears. Of course, the software is for the most part still running on your PC. When you insert or delete a word, or move the cursor around through your document, that computing is still done locally. It’s not at all like the old Wang word processors of the past that really did use dumb terminals and all the computing was on the server. What Google is really doing is lending you the software on a temporary basis, and doing storage and a few other background tasks in the cloud. Mostly what they want to do is make word processing cheap so that you have to repeatedly go to their web site to get it. Just another eyeball magnet. The whole web is really about applications that partly run on your PC and partly on the servers.
So I can see a day when you no longer buy and install applications on your PC. You will simply borrow them (and cache them, probably) as you need them. Today, my PC looks different from yours – it’s personalized with all the applications that I’ve purchased. Tomorrow, it’s like that my PC will be exactly the same as yours – all you would see is some kind of browser. I could log in on your PC and the screen would look exactly the same as it does on my PC – same word processor, same graphics programs, same set of files. Then the PC just becomes like a generic device, just like a cell phone. Stick your SIM card in someone else’s phone, and presto, it looks like your phone. Except you don’t have to have the physical SIM card.
Boxes software sales are already in the tank – retail stores are cutting back or eliminating their software shelves. With time, even downloaded software sales will start to decline as people move more to the “rental” model. But software is not going away for a long time – right now I’m sitting on a train. It will be a long time before they have high speed Internet on this train. I know it’s possible, but this is the USA where our public transportation infrastructure isn’t exactly the highest priority. Until that day comes, I need software and I need my hard drive. And when I get home and finally do connect to the Internet, I’ll be glad to have all my work automatically backed up in the cloud.
More information on Carbonite can be found at www.carbonite.com.au
Software as a Service, another great term to describe cloud computing/services. The article referenced below is by Esther Shein and was published in Computer World. I believe it provides some great examples of how small and medium sized businesses can use online backup solutions such as Carbonite and others to secure their vital business data. Here is a short extract and even though he didn’t pick Carbonite this time, maybe he will consider us when our small business solution is released sometime in 2009.
A data storage crash is the last thing a collision-repair shop needs to worry about. So when John Sweigart realized that the software he was using to manage his business was no longer compatible with the way he was backing up data, he knew it was time for a different option.
The Body Shop, has hundreds of records, including images that are kept on file for appraisers and insurers for at least a year. “It’s tons of information, and we’ve had occasions where the server’s crashed and we lost data,” says Sweigart, principal of The Body Shop. “We have paper files, but we still have to go back and re-create the electronic files.”
Since his business has multiple pieces of software to back up and no internal IT staff, Sweigart decided to outsource what had become a headache. He chose Verio, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) backup provider. For US$29 per location per month, The Body Shop has automatic backup of all its disk drives and servers every night.
Before switching to SaaS backup, each Body Shop location kept tapes on hand that an employee had to back up and take home at night. “It turned into such a comprehensive process, and you had to make sure it was done right every night and that someone was actually taking [the tape],” says Sweigart. “We had an incredible sense of paranoia doing all this extra work, and we needed a better option.”
Data backup continues to be a challenge — at small and midsize businesses in particular — because it requires a multifaceted infrastructure of backup software, networks, servers, disk arrays and tape systems. Many companies have trouble completing backups in the allotted time, and a significant number of backups fail or complete with errors. Often, companies don’t protect machines at remote locations because of the hassle, so there are gaps in backup coverage.
Because of issues like these, more companies are turning to SaaS backup providers, which support and maintain a variety of applications over the Internet without requiring their clients to invest in any servers or install any software on-site.
“Companies are feeling more comfortable with the concept of buying services out of the cloud,” notes Carl Howe, an analyst at Yankee Group Research. “I think there’s a perception that if it’s good enough for Google, it’s good enough for me.”
I thought I would start a few posts on Cloud Computing and how it impacts the everyday PC user. Why, well because I think over the next 5 years it will change the way we use our PCs.
Defined as:
Cloud computing literally means Internet (’Cloud’) based development and use of computer technology (’Computing’). It is a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service” using Internet technologies to multiple external customers. It allows users to access technology-enabled services without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them. See Wikipedia
Have you seen it? You will have experienced it if you use an MSN Hotmail email account or a Google Gmail account. Traditionally software including email software eg Outlook and Lotus Notes are sold as applications that you install and control through your desktop. Cloud computing equivalents, provide you with the same/similar functionality but you don’t install them, you simply login to a website and access your account and the application. You don’t have to worry about hosting them nor about where the information you save is stored. The provider of the service looks after all of that for you.
A detailed article about Cloud Computing and how it is changing the business world can be found at IT News. Quoted within the article
Gartner predicts that by 2012, 80 percent of Fortune 1000 enterprises will be paying for some cloud computing services, and 30 percent will be paying for cloud computing infrastructure services.
Why would a company or even a home PC user even consider a cloud computer solution? Mainly price and functionality that may not be available elsewhere. A good example is MS Office. If you really wanted to use these tools and you didn’t want to fork out the $190+ for it (Home/Student Edition), you could access Google Docs for free. I can only assume functionality is similar. It even lets you export the file so that you can then use it with other applications. Another good reason to use these ‘cloud’ services is because you can access the application and files from anywhere.
When travelling, you can pop into an internet kiosk and send your emails. Same thing with Google Docs and Spreadsheets you can work on a file at work and then access the same file at home. Very convenient.
Cloud computing also extends itself to backing up your PC. Traditionally, back-up is performed either via an external/internal hard drive, via CD/DVDs or via a Memory Stick. All of the methods work, but they are time consuming, can be difficult to manage, are prone to failure and can be expensive.
Cloud computing has revolutionised backing up your home PC. Why? Well, it’s quick, it’s simple, it does it all for you and its cheap. The way it works is that once you have installed the application, it begins reviewing your hard drive for folders and files and marks them as pending back-up. It then begins to copy and transfer them over the internet (securely) to the remote centre, where it securely stores them for you. As you continue to use your computer, it identifies the changes as well as new files and transfers them to your online backup account. You don’t have to remind it to do this. It just does it!
The clear benefit for this type of solution is that its automatic and because your data is stored online there is no hardware/clutter to worry about. Many services such as Carbonite offer unlimited back-up. So no matter how many pictures of the grandchildren you have, you can store them all online. Its also cheap. Carbonite retails for $59.95, that is security for 16c per day. Not much to pay for, for the security of some of your most prized possessions.
So what is the drawback. In Australia, cloud computing is still relatively new (beyond email systems). The Australian PC user needs to begin to trust the provider of the service before they place their most valued possessions with them. Services such as Carbonite that are global, and that invest millions in their warehousing facilities are in it for the long haul. They are also profitable businesses.
Once we get over the trust factor, well then, these cloud type services can be a gold mine for many people. Why not give them a try, it won’t cost you anything.
