Thinking about the Cloud?

Cloud computing is one of the hot topics in information technology. Gartner market research suggests that, "By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets." In other words, they will depend entirely on the cloud.

Cloud computing can be described as renting your IT from a provider such as Google, Microsoft or Amazon. A business can rent any service, with the most common being email. At the other end of the scale, it is also possible to rent all of your computing needs, including storage of data, instant messaging, customer relationship management (CRM), finance systems and so on.

There are positives and negatives to this; there is no need to purchase hardware and so reduces captial expenditure. Backup of data held in the cloud is done, usually by replicating it to another site, all carried out seamlessly.

Disadvantages are that your connection to the Internet is a limiting factor as all work carried out over it. In some cases, the overall cost may not be much different from having computer equipment on-site, or on-premise. Further, there can be a loss of flexibility in what can be achieved in the cloud.

At Virtual Stream, we don't ask if you are ready for the cloud - its is the cloud ready for you?

For plain talking advice, feel free to contact tracy@virtualstream.co.uk today. We can explain Amazon EC2, Microsoft BPOS or Office 365, Windows Intune and Azure and what they all can do for your business.