“That is the question. ‘Tis nobler …” I don’t want to butcher Shakespeare anymore than I have to, but a lot of people are asking this question today.
To some it’s a fad, like the Internet and talking movies. To others it’s the holy grail. They see it as the salvation to their business. Just mention cloud computing and a few other buzz words to customers and they will come running to your door.
To me, it’s a new way of looking at computing that I do believe will change things dramatically. As the world becomes more connected and mobile, the thought of building my own infrastructure to run business applications seems a bit outdated. My own business runs entirely in the cloud. I still use some local applications, like Microsoft Office, but all my line of business applications are in the cloud.
For me, the advantages are obvious. I don’t have to worry about an IT staff, managing servers, worrying about backup or thinking about firewalls. I point my browser somewhere, log in and do my business. I can do it from home, Starbucks, the airport or a hotel room. I can quickly set up a web conference, share a document with a partner or enter my expenses from a trip. It’s really easy.
Last week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, there was a lot of talk about cloud computing. No one is discussing if anymore, it’s when. Security in the cloud is the big thing now as more organizations use the cloud for mission critical tasks. The New York Times uses Amazon EC2 and S3for online archives. Virgin Atlantic uses Amazon Web Services to run their travel website. And lot of smaller companies like OneHub and ShareThis are using the cloud for their entire product lines. Why buy and manage an infrastructure when you can provision systems on the fly?
Are you using the Cloud for your business?
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