#16: Getting into the Cloud

Doing business of all sorts these days needs to have some kind of a computer system infrastructure in place.

You need to buy hardware (e.g. computers). You need to buy business automation suites (e.g. word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation software).

You may also need to buy a specialize accounting program to manage your finances, maybe an inventory software, a CRM (Customer Relations Management) System. These applications would then requires a computer server so users can have simultaneous access to your data. Computer server can be 10 times more expensive that your normal desktop computer.

It doesn't stop there though, depending on how many users you have, you may need to buy more licenses. You would also have to have a good backup system to protect your most important asset - your data.

And lastly of course you would need internet connection for your online activities, email system and your corporate website. Oh what about maintenance costs??? constant software and hardware updates, and then of course IT support can be very expensive too.

Adding up all these technology factors, your cost will definitely go through the roof.

Today, these expensive cost can be avoided my using the cloud computing technology. The cloud is actually a metaphor of the Internet.

In a cloud computing system, applications are running on the Internet. Accessing the cloud will not require installing any software. All you need is a web browser such as firefox or internet explorer. The beauty of cloud computing is that, you can have access to your applications anywhere you are as long as there's an internet connection available.

Most of us are already using cloud computing. If you have an e-mail account with a Web-based e-mail service like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or Gmail, then you are already using cloud computing.

Google actually offers cloud computing services (for free) on their gmail, google docs (word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation), calendaring and task management. Using these services, you can easily collaborate in the cloud by sharing these applications to other users.

Building Cloud Services is straight forward. Right now am playing around Amazon EC2 AWS (Amazon Web Services) to run different web Applications. I am quite impressed as I was able to install a complete web server running a LAMPP (Linux, apache, mysql, php, perl) stack and installed hosting control panel ispconfig and run Joomla CMS in under 10 minutes. I plan to move abrenian.com soon to AWS.

If you think you're spending a lot on your technology needs, maybe cloud computing is your solution...shoot me an email if you do.