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.

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

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!

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.

I was asked the other day is Cloud Computing like SaaS? Well I thought I would share the response for anyone else that night be interested in my opinion.

SaaS is about delivering a single application, normally this application has been written to be very scalable and a single application instance can serve many many customers. Almost exclusively these applications are Web 2.0 applications delivered to the end user in a browser from the Internet or Cloud.

A good example of this is SalesForce.com a well know CRM application.

The similarities between SaaS and Cloud Computing are the fact that the client is buying a service which normally consists of the applications an amount of storage space and a Service Level Agreement provided by a service provider. With both the solutions you normally get an elastic infrastructure 10 people 1 month 100 the next without the typical infrastructure considerations

Cloud Computing is however more about providing a completely integrated IT solution a mix of Web 2.0, and traditional applications including Office and hosted voice all within a hosted desktop.

So I would say the differences are:

Cloud Computing is capable of delivering an integrated IT solution comprising of all your applications rather than a single application.

Cloud Computing is about running your IT as a service with predictable costs and a quantifiable Service Level Agreement.

Please do not let this happen to you.  If you are looking at deploying a hosted VOIP solution then it can be great, excellent functionality that can span multiple sites, no capital investment and very quick to deploy.  However, they need to be deployed correctly.

Make sure when they are deployed that data and voice are segregated and then you will not sound like a Darlik or be talking to yourself.

The best way to deploy VOIP is over it’s own network.  At Cloud Computing all our Business VOIP is deployed over a dedicated end to end network insuring your call quality.

Virtulisation - virtulisation enables the decoupling of hardware from the operating systems and applications.  This enables far higher efficiently and reliability of the hardware platform capable of running multiple companies applications in their own discreet environment.

Utility computing - that enables dynamic server capacity across a grid infrastructure enabling you so scale on demand eliminating server upgrades.