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.
Its been an amazing week. Twitter and hour use of it to promote Carbonite in Australia has enabled us to access and connect with many businesses that we otherwise would not have ever been able to access. One of those is a @PaulHassing a writer for MYBRC, MYOB’s My Business Resource Centre which amongst many wonderful and really useful services for small business also has a blog that Paul manages.
I have been supporting this blog for some time, contributing opinions and re-tweeting where I think its appropriate in order to develop greater conversation, that is what social media is about.
Well Paul finally decided to find out what Carbonite was about and after some hesitation tried it. Whether it was the product itself, or the fact that he wanted to do be a favour for supporting his blog (probably a combination) he admitted to actually liking the idea of what Carbonite had to offer.
He wrote a blog post about it this week and published it. It received lots of comments which was great. I contributed where I could to provide some independence around the need for online backup. I thought what a great day, what a great outcome for Carbonite, I mean great exposure and all through Twitter.
At around 3pm that afternoon my wife calls me to tell me that the PC/laptop at home had frozen. I thought OK, this has happened before, just restart it. Vista Business has been relatively stable of late but its still Vista and a bit of a time bomb. The restart delivered an error telling me that a registry file was corrupted and that a reboot disk was needed.
Anyway my options where to take it to the PC store where I purchased it, or to re-image the machine and start from scratch myself. The end result would have been the same, other than the PC store probably would have saved some of the local files on my laptop. I took control of the situation and reboot it myself with my CD and after about 3 hours I had a fresh PC, the same PC I had when I purchased it, completely clean.
Now the story about the restoring files to my PC I will cover in posts over the coming weeks, however what really dawned on me is that with Outlook down, thank goodness that I used a cloud based email service for my primary email account. What this meant was that I could continue to answer emails regarding some personal matters that I attend to without having to worry about restores of data etc. I was live and communicating once I had the PC working again and the internet connected.
The second reason I say “Thank goodness for the Cloud”, is that even though I used 3 forms of backup for my files a local disk drive, a 1TB external drive and Carbonite, Carbonite was the only backup that was completely up to date. Everything else is atleast a few months old. The truth is that its current because it does it itself, there is no me getting involved. The automatic nature of Carbonite and online backup services in general really came through for me. I can’t thank them enough.
I do need to use my external drives more often, however my laptop sites in the dinning room of my house, I don’t have a separate study as each room is taken up by children at the moment. We are fast outgrowing our home.
Anyway, I can’t recommend online backup enough after what I have gone through this week. At the moment I am in the process of restoring via Carbonite. We are 23% of the way through and should be mostly done in the next day. That’s next week’s post.
Its been a busy week for journalists talking cloud computing this week. Maybe its just a coincidence but two major publications that I read have published articles on the topic within a number of days.
So for this week’s blog what I wanted to do was give you an in-site into what Australia was talking about in press when it comes to the cloud. In addition to this, I also wanted to add my own take on excerpts of these articles.
Lets smart with SmartCompany who ran an articles today in fact. Here is a short excerpt of the article:
With cloud computing it does not matter what size your business is; there are solutions to suit any size. That said, you should not leap into contracts based on the sales pitch from the software company, because they know how to sell their solution. As I say with all IT decisions, find a trusted advisor who has your best interests at heart and listen to their advice on cloud solutions that are the right shape for your organisation.
Over the next five years I expect we will see a lot of hybrid sites where there are still servers and PCs using local data and software as well as some cloud-based solutions. However, once the NBN has been put in place, there will be no reason to keep IT gear local. We will be making use of cloud-based everything and using very lightweight computers and pads to connect to whatever we need from wherever we are.
I thought this article provided a reasonable summary of what is in the cloud today and where it is heading for a small business. I particularly liked the part that talks about where jobs will trend in the future and how what we see today as critical tasks in our business may not be around in 10 years time. Technology is surely becoming a key part of every business even if we don’t have a web presence. Just using a computer to keep your cash receipts means that you are dependant on technology.
I also like the statement David makes on finding a trusted technology adviser to assist you to make the right decisions for your business. If you aren;t sure about the advice you are getting seek a second or third or even fourth opinion. And if you still aren’t sure then wait until you are. Technology decisions are rarely cheap ones so its important to be comfortable with what you are doing and the impact the decision will have on your business.
The second article was on Delimiter. This was aimed a little higher at the corporate end of the market, however it did have some important points that were also particularly relevant for small business in Australia.
Around about two years ago, a new term started to enter the Australian IT lexicon on a daily basis: Cloud computing. Perpetuated by vendors like Salesforce.com and Amazon, it stuck around like a bad smell for a while, before it gradually began to be picked up by the likes of Microsoft, VMWare and others.
Over the past six months, however, as the promise of cloud has failed to take the industry by storm, the phrase itself morphed. Chief information officers, IT managers, vendors and analysts suddenly started talking about “private cloud computing” instead.
So everyone’s talking about it – but what does it mean – especially in the Australian context? Who is providing private cloud services in Australia – and who is adopting them? What is the future of these services likely to look like?
What is fascinating about this article or excerpt in fact is that I first started marketing Carbonite just over 2 years ago, and cloud computing was all the rage, well starting to be anyway. Channel focused magazines were being filled with articles on cloud computing and the market was getting ready for a brand new wave of business sales in the cloud.
I can’t say I know what happened, I certainly don’t know if the sales kicked off or not, they probably didn’t. As with most things IT, there is a big marketing push and the magazines and press go crazy about a topic. Business however are a little slower making decisions. Two years ago they also had the beginnings of GFC on their mind.
However, Hayward says it’s important to realise that Australia has some unique challenges when it comes to cloud computing. For starters, most of the large public cloud computing companies – Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Google and so on – do not host any of their datacentres in Australia.
Couple this with the fact that many large Australian organisations in the financial services and public sectors have not only regulatory requirements but also a strong desire to host their data in the Australian legal jurisdiction, and you start to see that the normal types of cloud computing services don’t make sense for many large organisations in Australia.
This was also an interesting point and something that I also came across in selling Carbonite. Many legal and medical firms where interested in cloud backup but they had requirements that the data be stored in Australia. They also had concerns about privacy and accessibility.
Carbonite’s data centres are in the US and at this stage they have no intention of opening a data center in Australia. So there wasn’t much I could help them with on this. On the privacy and security issue, there was. Carbonite is a multi million dollar business and so it takes data and data security very, very seriously. If this doesn’t convince you then there is the Private Key that it also offers. Select your own. This means that when you need to restore your data, you also need to provide your key to unlock the data. Lose your key however and you have also lost your data.
I was speaking with a Carbonite reseller yesterday on the phone who began explaining to me some of the issues he was coming up against when trying to sell online backup to his customers.
One customer recently who wanted to backup his server refused to consider online backup as he didn’t think it was safe to place his data in the cloud. What was really surprising about this was that this person was in his early twenties. So I can only assume he would have done some research and formed this opinion ie it wasn’t just fear of the unknown.
He opted to use an external hard drive instead of an online backup service. We all have an opinion on where the cloud will go and in technology as in most things in life, there are no guarantees just risk mitigation.
Many people who enquire about Carbonite ask about data security. What do we have in place to mitigate the risk of total data loss? The key facts about Carbonite is that it is a very successful growing business that continues to do well financially and has the backing of investors that will see it continue to develop products and grow.
I suspect some of these questions relate to its pricing. $72 is very cheap in Australia to backup an entire PC. What people don’t realise is that Carbonite is an international operation with access to an international audience that has enabled it to reach a critical mass that will support its pricing.
From a technical perspective, Carbonite encrypts your data using ‘blow-fish’ technology whilst the connection is made with the Carbonite servers and whilst the data is being transported. The security used is the same as what banks use. Secondly, the investment in servers and redundancy continues to grow. Data Centre are guarded 24/7. Carbonite uses RAID6 redundant disk arrays – 36 million times more reliable than the hard drive in your computer. Carbonite also has multiple data centres.
What fascinated me about this person’s judgement was that he perceived the risk of a single hard drive failing to be less than that of an organisation like Carbonite that has hundreds of thousands of customers. Its laughable, but its also the barriers that will need to be worn away in Australia that will make more people accept online backup as a replacement to your traditional hard drive. Whilst I would never say don’t backup with a hard drive, given what I have seen of PC and hardware over the years as well as what I have learn’t about Carbonite working here, I always recommend that people use two forms of backup, a local source and one that is offsite.
