Friday, April 15, 2011

Cloud Computing

What is the Cloud and how does it affect me / you.

As for myself, I am building my business in the cloud...   That is me and my situation.   I work out of my home and at one time I did have a large server running in my office performing all the duties that I needed it to perform, email, monitoring as well as file storage.  I then of course had to make sure that it was being backed up.

The cost of the server per month in electricity was approx $20.00, but that was nothing to the noise and the amount of heat the unit produced.   Obviously this was not a brand new server, if it were the cost and heat would not have been as big of a issue.  It was around 5 years old....  

I migrated my Exchange Server to Google Apps Premier, and it has performed it main function without fail, email and calendar.   It does not have and probably will never have all the functions that Exchange has, but it suits my purpose.   It is a wonderful thing to be able to search all of your email from a Droid phone.   Could never do that with a Blackberry, Windows Mobile, or Iphone on Exchange.

I moved all of my files which were needed to Dropbox, if you don't know what this is, then I would suggest that you go to the site and check it out.   All of my files live in the cloud and are available to all of my devices, droid, mac, pc doesn't matter.   2 GB are free to start so check it out.

Monitoring, you don't need this unless you are a MSP, but I will mention it anyway.   I use a service that monitors all 400plus servers and workstations in the cloud.  I do pay a little more, but I do not have to worry with the server, updates or any of the other issues around keeping a monitoring service up and running.   I also have my PSA running in the cloud.  

The only applications that I use that are not in the cloud is Quickbooks and Office...   I think that is pretty cool.  Regardless of the device that is with me I can access all my files and data for a very reasonable amount.

What do you think?   Drop me a line at dave@mytechconnect.net