The Ubiquitous Cloud of 2012

The business skies are clouding for 2012. This cloud isn’t a sign of foul weather ahead. Just the opposite. The cloud of 2012 brings relief to businesses living on a razor’s edge with little confidence in their ability to predict the future. Why try to be a forecaster when you can simply position yourself to respond as needed, depending on which way the wind blows?

Is there climate change afoot? One could easily argue that the business climate has already changed. Many businesses have found themselves stuck in the doldrums where nothing moves at all. Others experience volatility, where they are not sure which way the breezes will blow tomorrow. How many managers long for the old days, not that many years ago, when growth was robust, the path ahead was crystal clear, and there were no storms brewing on the horizon?

The best remedy for this new, new climate may not be to run away from developing clouds, but toward them. The IT cloud can be the solution you need to fend off those other clouds of doubt, worry and ill-weather. What the information technology cloud can do is let you ride with the wind and tack as needed to meet your business goals. Technically, what cloud services do is let you move from an ownership model of investing, maintaining and upgrading to a rental model of pay-as-you-go.

Ownership has its advantages. It puts you in control. Your business capital is right down the hall where you can see it. Nobody can take it away from you because it’s yours. You can do with it what you wish. There is depreciation to help the bottom line and once it is paid off, you own it without further payments... or so you think.

The problem with the ownership model for technology is that today’s servers and PBX systems aren’t like steam engines, lathes, CNC machining centers or mainframe computers. You don’t buy a monster machine for your company and expect it will still be going strong long after you retire. The half-life of anything powered by electronic chips or dependent on the vagaries of the World Wide Web is almost shorter than the time you need to get it fully productive.

Your capital investment is also the start of your costs, not the end. Even if breakdowns are infrequent, there is a steady stream of upgrades, modifications and security features to be installed and tested. That means ongoing costs for both software and personnel. None of this stuff runs perfectly for long with your back turned. There is always the need to deal with something that has dropped offline or needs a soft reset. It is nature of anything microprocessor based to get lost in its nearly incalculable software paths. It’s rare that you need to shutdown a box to stop the smoke from pouring out. It’s a given that you’ll need to unplug it and plug it back in to “magically” fix whatever is hung up.

There’s no denying the inherent nature of technology. The real question is whether it makes more sense for you to take ownership of these issues or pawn them off on someone else. A decade or two ago, the answer was clearly to do as much in-house as possible. Today? Launching those monkeys off your back and into the cloud is looking better and better.

I haven’t dropped the word “outsourcing” yet, but this is the time to embrace it. In simplest terms, you hire someone else to do things that are more cost effective for them to handle than for you to do yourself. On a macro scale, there can be major societal upheaval caused by suddenly shifting 100,000 jobs from here to there. On a micro scale, business by business, the evolution from doing everything in-house to buying services from other companies specialized in that service can increase your agility to compete in a world where the view of tomorrow is murky. Outsourcing technology to the cloud is going to be big in 2012, perhaps enveloping.

What can you transfer to the cloud? Technology tools are prime candidates. You use these tools to perform your business, they aren’t the core of your business. Does it make any difference to the nature of what you are doing whether you own that rack of servers, rent the same boxes from a colocation center or pay by the hour to use virtualized servers in the cloud? Not if they all do exactly the same function.

Technology services in the cloud now include virtual servers that can be expanded or contracted instantly, pools of disk storage, high bandwidth Internet connections, network security, development platforms, enterprise software packages, and telephone communications. That’s right, you no longer need a telephone system in your office. You still need the phones, of course, but the switching system and the outside trunk lines to the public telephone network can be provided by the cloud. That includes contact and call centers as well.

There must be a good reason for all the fervor surrounding cloud based services. Is it simply the fashionable new thing for business or are we experiencing a fundamental shift in how we will run businesses for the foreseeable future? If this is the new mode of operation to be competitive, how long do you want to wait before checking it out? It’s likely well worth your while to at least compare cloud options to what you are doing now. Then decide whether a small cloud, large cloud or no cloud at all makes the most sense for your business.

SMB Cloud Computing Portfolio

Cloud computing has come to the enterprise in a big way, but how about the small to medium size businesses? Does anyone offer a portfolio of cloud services that make sense for these companies?

Just such a collection of integrated cloud services is now available from Broadview Networks. Broadview is a communications provider serving the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic United States. They offer a wide variety of connectivity that includes the popular T1 and bonded T1 lines, Ethernet over Copper, Metro Fiber Ethernet, MPLS networking, SIP Trunking and even POTS lines.

What makes Broadview Networks particularly interesting as a cloud services provider is that they already have the connectivity you need to get to the cloud. Many cloud computing companies offer only the infrastructure, platform or software as a service. It’s up to you to figure out how you’ll reliably connect to their cloud. Broadview can give you both the services and the high reliability connections that make it all work seamlessly.

Cloud communications, also called Hosted PBX, moves the telephone switching system and its network out of your facilities and to the service provider. Your handsets connect directly to your LAN, along with your PCs, printers and other network equipment. An advantage of Hosted PBX is that you don’t need the capital investment, maintenance and dedicated staff to have an enterprise phone system for your business. That’s all handled by the service provider.

Broadview Networks offers Hosted PBX for the SMB, but also has a new portfolio of cloud computing services. These include Hosted Business E-Mail, Office Anywhere, Hosted SharePoint, Cloud Backup and Recovery, and both Virtual and Dedicated Servers. All of these help you increase productivity without the traditional capital expenditures.

Broadview’s Hosted Business E-mail is a managed email solution that gives you enterprise-grade e-mail functions that include contacts, calendaring, notes, tasks and folders. If you wish, you can expand this functionality with Hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010 to gain shared contacts, cross-user tasks, distribution lists, group calendaring, plus archival, compliance and eDiscovery options. You control everything through an administrator portal that lets you quickly and easily add or delete e-mail boxes.

Office Anywhere uses Citrix 6.0 to virtualize your desktop environment so that user applications and data reside in the cloud. This is especially valuable for mobile workers and business with multiple locations, in that documents and applications can be accessed through a simple Web browser anywhere in the world. No need to worry about individual file backups. All data is automatically backed up in the cloud and easily recovered when needed.

Broadview’s Hosted Microsoft SharePoint 2010 helps your team collaborate in a secure real-time environment. That includes road warriors, home-based employees and remotely located colleagues. The SharePoint environment lets them collaborate and create as if they are all located in the same room. Team members can view, comment and edit the same document, speeding the process of document creation, review and revision.

Do you still want to maintain your own servers or create a hybrid public and private cloud with some of your own equipment augmented by on-demand cloud services? Either way, you need a robust backup and recovery system to protect your valuable business information files. Broadview’s Cloud Data Backup and Recovery gives you the ability to backup your data to a high performance data center in the cloud. You’ll have secure off-site disaster recovery and backup with on-demand provisioning of extra storage. In addition to backing up your mission critical servers, you can also backup up employee’s workstations and laptops from anywhere in the world. No need to worry about losing a laptop and its valuable data or suffering an untimely disk failure. Your data is easily recovered from the cloud so you can continue operations.

Broadview is also a colocation hosting services provider. They offer virtualized or dedicated servers secured in SAS 70 Type II-certified data centers. You have your choice of Windows or Linux operating systems running on HP and Cisco servers.

Have you been curious about what a move to the cloud can do for your business? Regardless of size, there are cloud services scaled to meet your needs. Check out pricing and availability for SMB cloud computing services now to assist your tradeoff analysis.



Note: Background cloud photo courtesy of NASA Goddard.

Computing In The Cloud

“Cloud computing” is the term you see everywhere lately. But what is computing in the cloud all about and are there really benefits to moving out of your own data center and into the cloud?

Cloud computing originally meant accessing a pool of computers to accomplish a task that was too big for the resources you could afford to own. You may have contributed some unused computing power to the SETI@Home program to help search for ET. It’s still going, by the way, after almost 12 years of combing through the output of radio telescope signals. The genius behind this project is to link thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of idle personal computers through broadband Internet connections. Each PC has a small but significant amount of unused processing power. By divvying up a large computing task into bite (byte?) size pieces and collecting the results, all those computers can be linked to create one enormous virtual supercomputer.

The idea of calling remotely located distributed resources a “cloud” goes back to the public telephone network and later to the Internet. Engineers would draw a picture of a cumulus cloud to represent a network who’s complexity was far more than needed to be diagramed every time you wanted to use it. Somewhere out in the misty core of that cloud were all the resources required. You only needed to understand it abstractly, the way most users don’t need to understand the detailed workings of their PC to be able to use it effectively.

If we had infinite budgets, there wouldn’t be much use for cloud computing. Every company would simply buy all the computers, software, storage, data center facilities and staffing they needed. One problem is that much of the time, especially on second and third shifts, most of capacity you pay for sits idle. Even during business hours, you need enough resources to handle peak loads to maintain employee productivity and customer satisfaction. That means your average usage is well below the maximum capacity of your systems most of the day.

Few companies have infinite budgets and today’s financial environment makes it difficult to get enough capital for all the computing capacity they would like. Even the well-heeled want to hedge their bets by just using what they need as they need it, without long term commitments. The fuzzier the future looks, the more attractive pay-as-you-go looks.

That’s the impetus behind today’s rush to all things in the cloud. Yes, you can buy processing by the minute if all you need is more computing capacity. But the cloud computing definition has expanded to include all sorts of resources including web servers, online disk storage, backup and recovery storage, standard software packages, development platforms, and even PBX telephone systems. The hosted telephone services are known specifically as cloud communications services.

What’s important from a business aspect is that you rent rather than buy these services. They are available on a per minute, per seat or per feature basis. You use what you need without regard to what other customers of the service may be doing. The cloud computing provider has the responsibility to have enough capacity on-hand to meet everyone’s needs and to keep everything up to date and running smoothly.

Does the cloud computing business model sound like an attractive option for your business? If so, or if you would simply like to investigate the options, check out features and pricing for cloud computing services. One or more of these services may well be more cost effective that what you are doing now.