In this week’s blog I thought I would let the video do the talking rather then me the writing. I have sourced a collection of videos from the web that do a reasonable job in explaining what cloud computing is and does. You might already know the answers but maybe your clients don’t. I have provided a short description of each video.
The first is from Salesforce and although it is a few years old it does a great job in very quickly giving you an overview of what the cloud can do for your business and how it can be used. It’s focus is business application and what businesses have traditionally done to manage company wide applications.
This video nicely explains cloud computing and how it works as well as how it compares to doing it the traditional way. The key subject example used by the presentation is website hosting which is something that many people are familiar with. The presentation is quite entertaining and very easy to follow.
At the Web 2.0 Expo, Tim O’Reilly, Dan Farber, Matt Mullenweg, Jay Cross, Brian Solis, Kevin Marks, Steve Gillmor, Jeremy Tanner, Maggie Fox, Tom McGovern, Sam Lawrence, Stowe Boyd, David Tebbutt, Dave McClure, Chris Carfi, Vamshi Krishna and Rod Boothby were asked one question: “What is Cloud Computing?”. Here’s what they all said.
Next we move to something very local. Optus’ business channel runs a panel discussion regarding the cloud and the hype behind it.
The cloud promises to deliver many benefits to businesses including lower costs, easier access and less risk. An expert panel including Duncan Bennett (VMware), Marc Caltabiano (Oracle), Rob Livingstone (Cloud expert and author) discusses if there is too much hype around this technology and why the cloud means different things to different people or businesses.
The final video is from Google of course which is the most famous cloud computing company at the moment. The range of Google Apps available to small business makes it probably one of the first ways that many small businesses will experience the cloud. Yes we have all heard of GMail but Google Apps have a lot more business application. The video runs through many of the Apps has to offer and how they can be used within your small business.
Hopefully this range of video provides you with enough info so that you do develop a basic plus some understanding of what cloud computing is, what it isn’t, how it can apply to business and what your business can do to try it out.
Has your small business ever suffered a loss of its data? I read a story earlier today where it took this one small business which had a car drive through its shopfront and took out the network and servers over 6 months to really recover.
No doubt many small businesses will over the past few years have heard or read about using cloud services and the benefits that it can deliver for their business.
Today many applications come in both a cloud as well as a desktop form, from accounting software, to CRMs, to everyday business applications such as word processing and spreadsheets. The move into the cloud now gives small business the opportunity to use the best applications without the traditional costs associated with buying and owning licensing, renewing licensing as well as installing and managing updates.
By partnering with cloud service providers, small business can benefit from the backup systems they offer, the redundancy that is in place and access to technical staff that they wouldn’t normally be able to afford.
And if you are a small business that isn’t ready to set up offices to house your staff, cloud services can provide the ideal solution giving all employees regardless of where they are located (home or on the road) direct access to company systems. This means that staff can be productive wherever they are. It also means that small business can either downsize their office space saving money or use that excess rent money for other more important needs.
With the growth in mobile handheld devices like smart phones and tablets, many cloud services have created interfaces specifically for these devices so that you can be connected no matter what you are doing.
Many start-ups are going straight to the cloud from day one, using services such as Google Apps to service the needs of staff wherever they are. Functions such as Chat also enables them to be constantly connected.
What is also so great about the cloud is that updates are always automatic and managed by the cloud provider. Small business no longer needs to buy the upgrades to have access to the latest functionality, nor do they need to invest in people to manually implement the upgrades (as well as manage the conflicts that result from upgrades).
However the question still remains as to whether small businesses are really turning to the web. A recent report by Gartner suggest that the GFC has caused many businesses to look at more effective and efficient ways to manage their IT costs.
Beyond accessing your software via the cloud, some businesses are also turning to accessing their infrastructure via the cloud. So instead of housing your own data centre, small business can have access to everything that large businesses would normally be accessing without the huge investment required. These services include power, high speed internet bandwidth, backup and security.
Having mentioned Google Apps a couple of times, I thought I would end this post with a brief summary of what is available as cloud services for the small business. We start with Google Apps.
Gmail for business – 25 GB storage
Google Calendar – agenda management, scheduling, shared online calendars and mobile calendar sync
Google Docs – documents, spreadsheets, drawings and presentations
Google Groups – user-created groups providing mailing lists, easy content sharing, searchable archives
Google Sites – secure, coding-free web pages for intranets and team managed sites
Google Video – Private, secure, hosted video sharing
With regards to a CRM you may also want to consider services such as Salesforce.com and ACT. Finally in terms of your accounting and bookkeeping take a look at XERO and MYOB’s Live Accounts.
There has been some very healthy commenting on a blog post within the flyingsolo.com.au website this week following an article by David Moore, from I Hate My PC.
You can read the whole article here, however I do have an extract for you.
I’m going to tell you the most important information you’ll ever hear about data backups. They come from the heart, they come from cold hard facts and they come from painful experience.
Data backups are essential, but they aren’t sexy or fun. They’re often done poorly, overlooked altogether or fail when you need them most.
I’m not going to tell you what method to use to do your backups because every situation is different. Instead I’m going to share the facts you must take into account:
1. Your backup needs to involve a person who cares about the data
I’m sure you’ve heard about (and maybe even bought) automatic backup solutions that “look after themselves”.
Why would you believe that? Nothing else in computing looks after itself, so why would your backups?
It is a worthwhile article to read and so are the comments left by many small business owners. Online backup must become a part of all backup strategies in particular those of small businesses.
The case that automated is an over-promise has merit, not so much that you can’t let software run the show for you but more from the point of view that you need to test your backup regularly. Furthermore it is your responsibility to ensure that it is working, that the backups are being made and that the data on the backup is up to date. A person needs to do this, you can’t rely on a PC or software to ensure that this is 100% correct.
Whenever I hear a customer telling me that they will install Carbonite and then all of their backup needs will be totally taken care of, I shudder. Much like anti-virus software, the software can only do so much, you also need to be a little smart about the sites you visit and the information you place on those sites.
Carbonite was developed to help everyday consumers and small business get a backup service up and running simply and easily whether they had a internal or external IT person or not at all. Given its easy install process and automated nature, once installed it will begin the backup process and then keep monitoring files for change.
Your responsibility is to ensure that the correct files are selected for backup and that the software is working correctly all of the time. You can check this easily via the Carbonite Backup Drive. This service sits in your system tray and tells you what is happening. What you need to look out for is the green lock eg
If you double click on this what you need to see is:
With your Backup Drive showing you that “Your backup is up-to-date” you can feel secure that your Carbonite software is doing what it should be doing. You can see below what my PC shows.
The take up of online backup services such as Carbonite over the past 3 years in Australia has been significant. This is supported by the fact that flyingsolo as a small business website has run two backup feature articles over the last couple of months.
When we first started marketing Carbonite 3 years ago and approached flyingsolo to contribute articles they didn’t think that their audience would be interested. True story and shows how far we have come.
The issue of internet plans not supporting online backup services is also a misnomer. True that if you don’t watch your backup you could go over your limits but the data plans in Australia have been growing so much that this would really only affect a few people. My experience has been 2 complaints in the 3 years that I have been associated with Carbonite.
This comment is also very relevant:
Ultimately, if you don’t regularly test your backup, try to recover any or all of the data from wherever you’ve chosen to store it, then you are just giving yourself a false sense of security.
The risk that the data wasn’t backed up correctly is a real risk, but so is that fact that you won’t know how to restore it properly if you don’t practice. You need to know how to add the backup to your MYOB or other files. How to return the files to your Outlook.
The beauty of an automated service is that if you don’t have time to do a manual backup and worse still if you are not backing properly at the moment, it can give you a serious head start. Whilst it might be every PC technician’s ultimate recommendation, Carbonite has saved hundreds and millions of files for every day consumers and business owners all over the world.
This is what gives us the confidence to continue recommending this service.
I spent some time at the exhibitor lounge of the Adtech Conference in Melbourne (Hilton on the Park) this week. I wasn’t lucky enough to access to the sessions (at over $1000 a seat it was on the steep side) but I thought I would venture out and see what the big guys where talking about. We all want to learn more and having access to real life case studies can be a great way to get inspired.
On my way there, I saw an advertisement by Qantas which made me think just how far we have come in the last few years when it comes to digital marketing that Qantas can add qantas.com/rewards on a billboard and customers will naturally think that it is referring to the url of their website. A few years ago this would not have been possible but we are now so used to see web addresses that we accept them as a call to action within advertising.
So I arrived at Adtech, I actually got confused as to which hotel it was on the way and decided to look the event up on my smart phone. Adtech’s mobile site is not very user friendly. It actually isn’t a mobile site at all but a miniature version of the normal PC browser site. That was disappointing from the event organiser.
I did eventually arrive and I can say that the event wasn’t as large as I would have thought. There were about 15 exhibitors in total. Three where Analytics vendors and another 2 or 3 where email service provides. Thrown into the mix was a social media community service (communityengine.com) which enables an organistion to create their own social media platform. This was used primarily within the Govt sector. There was also a CMS provider (Sitecore) and probably the most interesting of the lot a provider of content (castleford). Yes a professional journalist service which writes content for your blog and can also manage your social media content accordingly. This isn’t one of those dodgy article writing service, it was a professional service.
From the analytics providers it was all about integrating social media activity into your analytics and enable your company to get a broader picture of what was going on and around the website. WebTrends has a new version coming out and Omniture also had a social media module coming out.
Actually there was one other interesting exhibitor in research.ly a reporting tool looking at the activity around your brand within the social world and who was influencing it. This service actually has a 30 day trial that I thought was worth testing.
In terms of the presenters, I know Pepsi did a talk on some of the promotion that they ran during the Superbowl this year and found that using social media delivered for them just as much traffic and activity as did running TV advertisements. I wonder what the difference in cost was and how much of a lasting effect each campaign has had.
Social media is certainly on tip of most marketing executives tongues this year and with it comes expectations of integrated campaigns covering traditional media and social. This is exciting but also a little daunting because social media is still very new and the tools and know-how on how to do it well and effectively are only starting to be created.
If you’re a regular visitor to our blog, you’ll know Carbonite provides access to your data whilst on the go. Our applications provide users of iPhones, iPod Touches, BlackBerry smartphones and Android devices with access to their files on the move. Our remote access feature also allows access to your backed up files from an Internet connected PC.
This is why we’re delighted to announce another addition to our “anytime, anywhere access” line-up with the release of Carbonite Access for iPad.™
The app is available for free from the App Store℠ and provides all iPad owners with Carbonite accounts the ability to browse, view and share all their backed up files. Using the app, backed up photos can be previewed either in full-screen or thumbnails through Carbonite’s integrated image gallery, whilst music lovers can instantly access their backed up music, without waiting for the songs to download!
We’ve also released updated versions of our apps for iPhone, iPod Touch and BlackBerry devices. So if you fancy having “anytime, anywhere” access to your data, without maxing out the storage space on your device then visit the AppStoreSM, BlackBerry App World™, where you can download any of the applications.
