While there has been a lot of buzz in the media about the “cloud” and “cloud computing”, I often find that ordinary business people (as opposed to the “geeks” and more technical folks) are a bit confused about what it is, why they should care about it, and how it can help them in business. In a brief presentation to the White Plains BCA Business Development Group this week, I tried to end some of the confusion. Here are my notes from that talk.
1. The “cloud computing” concept is not new.
Before it was “cloud” we called it “on demand”, before that “utility computing”, before that “network centric computing”, and way back we called it “time-sharing”. The term “cloud” was first used in the 1970’s (some sources will say 1960’s).
2. “Cloud” is a marketing term, used for almost anything accessible over the Internet
And every vendor defines their “cloud” solution in a way that they think helps them the most.
3. Three reasons why “cloud computing” is important.
- Over the past 5-7 years, there has been an explosion of new services available that can produce reliability and productivity gains for organizations of all sizes.
- While this has been happening, the cost of these services is being driven lower and lower (both by technology innovations and market competition).
- And many more services are being developed every day. Forrester estimates the cloud market to be $40B market in 2011 and grow to $240B by 2020, representing a 20% YOY growth rate.
4. (I think I skipped this one)
5. Five key elements of a cloud solution
This is my definition of “cloud”, one that speaks to the business—not technical—aspects of the solution:
- Use it over the internet (or wi-fi, or 3G)
- No (or low) upfront capital costs
- Use the provider’s infrastructure
- Maintained by the provider
- Easily add or remove users (or increase or decrease storage, etc.)
6. Six reasons to care—the benefits
Basically, less work, lower cost, higher reliability and security, for example:
Use on internet = access from office, home, hotel
No upfront capital cost = preserve capital budget
Use provider’s infrastructure = nothing for us to buy, build, or maintain
Easily add/remove users = pay only for what we use
Better reliability than an in-house solution at a similar price point (usually!)
Better fail-over/recovery (again, usually, see next item)
7. Seven dirty secrets about the cloud—things to watch out for and investigate
I believe businesses need to “check out” their cloud service providers. Larger organizations conduct formal risk assessments of their providers. Smaller organizations need to take some basic steps, like:
- Privacy Policy (read it, and make sure you’re comfortable with it)
- Terms of Service (ditto)
- Acceptable Use Policy (ditto)
- Security (understand what the provider is committing to offer, and what your responsibilities might be)
- Availability/Reliability (ditto)
- Failover/Disaster Recovery (ditto)
- Termination—what happens when you want to leave
8. Eight great cloud services to investigate, for almost any organization
- E-mail & Calendars
- E-mail continuity
- File sharing & collaboration
- Offsite Backup and Disaster Recovery
- Desktop & server management & monitoring
- CRM
- Accounting
- Virtual Desktops
