Everyone from Walmart to my 10 year old nephew is using cloud computing. Small and mid-sized businesses see it as a great way to use the types of services that were only available to large organizations in the past. Large companies see it as a way to scale quickly and provide new services fast. My business runs completely in the cloud. Ten years ago this would have been impossible.
Businesses are taking advantage of filing sharing services from Onehub, DropBox, Egnyte, Box and others to share documents across PCs, Macs, smart phones and tablets. Evernote is a great service for sharing meeting notes and documents with colleagues. Numerous other services exist for collaborating with customers, business partners, development teams and anyone who needs access to information quickly and from any device. The cloud has become a big virtual file cabinet for most of us.
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I just finished reading a book where the entire operations of a financial company are digital. “The Fear Index” by Robert Harris is a thriller that combines the world of hedge funds with an algorithmic trading program that becomes autonomous. The financial company uses no paper in its operations. In fact no paper products or anything related to them are allowed in the offices.
There are no magazines or newspapers in the reception area. It is company policy that as far as possible, no printed material or writing paper of any sort should pass the threshold. They came up with a clever incentive to ensure this. Each employee is required to pay a fine of 10 Swiss francs each time they were caught in possession of ink and wood pulp rather than silicon and plastic. Violators would have their names posted on the company intranet.
It’s amazing how effective this was in changing behavior. They also realized that they couldn’t control if their visitors carried paper, but it was very evident from the lack of paper in the office, that it was frowned upon.
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About a year ago I wrote a blog post about dumb excuses for using paper documents. In the last 12 months things haven’t changed a lot, although I am happy to see some organizations are moving in the right direction.
The Baltimore Ravens and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers moved their playbooks to Apple iPads last season and more NFL teams announced plans to do the same this year. Some of these playbooks can be 800 pages. Try lugging that much paper around with you wherever you go.
More organizations are thinking of getting rid of paper documents in favor of accessing the information on iPads or other mobile devices. Alaska Airlines and American Airlines replaced their flight manuals with iPads. Other organizations are thinking about doing this too. If pilots are using iPads, then they should be able to sign off on flight readiness electronically rather than using paper and pen. That would speed up flight checks and hopefully get planes on their way faster. Wouldn’t that be nice?
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Whether your data is sitting in your data center on a server or in a service provider’s data center in the cloud, making sure it’s safe is critical to your business surviving. I’m not talking about public information, like your marketing brochures or press releases, but about sensitive and confidential information.
Some people believe that your data is safe if it’s inside your own datacenter. You have firewalls, intrusion detection systems, anti-virus and a host of perimeter defenses. Yet, in the last few months alone, companies have had hundreds of thousands of records stolen from servers sitting in so-called protected environments.
Manwin Holding SARL had 350,000 personal records exposed because they were sitting in an unused forum in plain text. YouPorn had 1.4 million email addresses, passwords and dates of birth sitting in a plain text debug file on a publically accessible website. Last year Sony had millions of records compromised by sloppy security practices on its popular gaming sites.
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One of the most interesting things about software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing in general is that many offerings are trying to simplify people’s lives. They are taking the complexity out of something and making it easier for you to focus on your business.
If I want to build a SaaS application today, I would most likely use the Amazon or Microsoft cloud for my platform (or pick your favorite provider). I purchase virtual computing time and storage and run my application. They have made it easy for me to get up and running. I don’t have to find and buy a server, install an operating system, configure it and then worry about maintaining it. Someone else worries about all that.
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