What is the Cloud?

“Cloud Computing”.  You may have heard or seen this new catch word that many organizations have adopted in to there line up of services. What is “Cloud Computing”? This can be a hard question to answer as many people have their own definition on this type of computing.

The items that Cloud Computing Services provide that intrigue most organizations are the following: saving your company money, access to the latest technical advancements in software, and anywhere access via the internet to your hosted cloud services, that operate on a very reliable/redundant hardware platform.

The infrastructure that allows us to provide Cloud computing is still built on server hardware similar to what you may have in your office. The main differences are the hardware is more reliable, components are redundant, and for the most part, the software is the most feature rich release from the vendors. Small and Medium size business now have Enterprise software available to them that is normally out of reach, as normal IT budgets would not be large enough.

Now the best part of all this technology is you don’t have to purchase any of it. All of the services in the “Cloud” are provided for a monthly fee. These services can scale up and down as your business grows or shrinks. You can think of it as an elastic environment.

Instead of the hardware being in your office, it is now located in a secure building called a data center. Security is of the highest importance in data centers. Data centers should only allow access to individuals that pass criminal record checks and technicians that are highly qualified. All access in and out of the data center should be recorded and monitored via video cameras. You will find that many of these data centers are located in concrete bunkers protected from fire and theft. Multiple levels of access are required to gain entry to the equipment.

If you have a server or application that you need to run that operates your business, in many cases we can host this server in a “Cloud” Environment. There are some applications that require more work than others but for the most part if the application runs on Windows it can also run on Windows in the “Cloud”.

Hosted servers can run Microsoft and Linux operating systems and access to these servers can be provided via multiple secure methods. If the workload increases on the server and it starts to run slow, we can scale up the hardware resources providing a better performing system suited to the workload demand. Your data backups will also be looked after for you with out the need to take home tapes or hard drives.

Storage can also be provided via Cloud hosted servers. There are some applications that require a back end SQL server or database of some kind. These databases can be setup on a server in the data center and secure access can be provided to the resources. We have multiple ways of providing access to these types of data. You can host almost any type of data that resides on a windows environment, from Microsoft Office Documents, to Simply Accounting or Quickbooks Databases.  Dedicated or Secure Shared storage can be provided based on the customer’s requirements.

Cloud hosted servers and applications can be bundled with system maintenance packages. There are some services where all maintenance is looked after for you. Instead of having an Exchange Email server in your office that you have the expense of maintaining, this can all be looked after for you via Hosted Exchange in the Cloud. The maintenance to run any server in your office can be costly over the long run. The ability to have a set cost on your IT/Cloud Services is a very attractive concept for most organizations.

The operational costs vs investment costs should be reviewed when looking at purchasing new equipment. When you acquire expensive hardware to run your services it is considered as a capital expenditure and can be a large one at times.  Also, the acquisition depreciates over the years. The Cloud computing model allows you to spread your expenses over several operational cycles, becoming part of operational costs. Your accountant will most likely tell you this is a much better alternative.

To summarise, cloud computing is growing at a phenomenal rate, both in the range of services offered by cloud vendors and also in the way companies are using these services to improve their own business.

Please contact us at Northern Computer and we can provide a consult to see if Cloud Computing fits your business needs.

- Martin O, Network Support Technician

Northern Computer - Your Trusted Partner
#1 - 495 Banks Road Kelowna, BC V1X 6A2
Phone: 250.762.7753 Fax: 250.861.1861 Toll-Free: 1.877.257.2896
Email: sales@northerncomputer.ca or service@northerncomputer.ca
Web: http://www.northerncomputer.ca