Cloud

From Could to Cloud

Cloud Solutions can simply be defined as a means of providing you an application or service vie the internet on platforms you neither own nor maintain.

Cloud is a manner of application or service consumption. For example, O365 is a cloud service. You pay a monthly fee based on the number of subscribers and options and features such as security, archiving, filtering etc.. You never own anything but the data you receive or create. A true consumption model.

The cloud model works great because it reduces the complexity on your company of maintaining a hardware platform, including storage as well as software and in many cases, help desk. Finance likes it because you only pay for what you use and it’s easy to budget. Users like it because typically these applications are available to them wherever they can get internet access.

But in the ease of doing business, there are two key challenges: (1) now business groups outside of IT are able to procure and consume cloud services (i.e. Marketing may want to procure a cloud subscription to Adobe Photoshop). This means that the opportunity to have a huge sprawl of applications in any one company, all of which may be critical to business survival is completely decentralized and un-managed. (2) Security, with this proliferation comes the result that your company IP assets are now distributed in data centers throughout the country or the world.

How do you know your data is secure from cyber-terror? How do you backup and recover that data in the event of a disaster? It becomes the responsibility of IT to answer these questions.