Is the principle of Cloud Computing new?
A question I am being asked at least once a week at the moment. Well certainly the phrase is new. However the technology and the application of the technology is not new. In fact it has been around for over 5 years.
Actually 100% of the FTSE 100 is running this technology in some form. Most of our service providers have been delivering applications for over 4 years.
What I would say is that bringing this technology together into purpose build multi-tenanted platform is quite new and the market is waking up to the idea of this being the new way to run IT systems.
Analysts are anticipating Cloud Computing to be the future of how businesses run IT and the amount of hosted desktop in business to be around 40% by 2013. Essentially we are talking about IT as a service and SMEs have the most to gain.
Yes it is true we can deliver IT as a service for less than £2.00 per day.
What is in the box?
Microsoft Exchange 2007 Email with Outlook 2007 or Entourage for MAC
Shared File System with access permissions
Microsoft Office 2007 (Word, Excel and PowerPoint)
5GB file Storage
Anti Virus
Anti Spam
Full nightly backup of data
Ability to provide network device sharing (like printing and file sharing)
All you need is a computer and internet connection oh and £2.00
I get asked this question regularly. With security there are 2 elements to it.
Physical security
A compare a commercial class data centre to a typical office and 99 out of 100 the data centre is going to come on top.
Data privacy
If you have third party consultant at work on your premises then this is fairly similar to a cloud environment. The added benefit of Cloud is that Cloud Service Providers have typically invested in technology and processes to mitigate this risk.
Someone likened the question to when the Internet first became a commercial must. Funny enough you don’t get asked that question anymore!
Hosted Desktop explained
The Hosted Desktop is available in more variations than there are flavours of Ice Cream.
Delivery type
There are 3 different methods of delivery each with their own characteristics like bandwidth usage, security and look and feel. These are Microsoft Terminal Services, Citrix and VMWare Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).
Applications
Then we come to what applications are being delivered. The standard variant tends to come with Microsoft Office, Microsoft Exchange with either Outlook or Entourage for Mac users. Obviously the range of anti-virus and anti-spam also tend to vary based on the service provider. This would not be complete without the option of hosting your applications. We typically see a wide range of finance systems, bespoke applications and specific applications around a customer vertical market. Each of these applications is normally provided a virtual server which will be backed up, patched and managed by the service provider. Your custom application support is still provided much in the same way it would be now but service providers tend to offer remote access and a range of functions that enhance what is typical available to them.
Telephony
The telephony options are typically strong across the board providing the ability to have direct lines, voicemail, conference calling and of course the ability to port your existing numbers across. Premium options include Interactive Voice Response (IVR), integration with applications like Outlook and your CRM and video conferencing.
Support
The standard support is normally around office hours with 1 or 2 exceptions. This not only provides support to the company but support for each individual user. The platform is typically monitored 24/7 for major outages.
Data Centres
The offering normally starts at office based data centre right through to multiple commercial data centres geographically dispersed.
