As defined by Gartner1, “Cloud computing is a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using Internet technologies.” In plain English, this means, doing things through the internet instead of directly on your computer.  Recently we have seen many articles on new or growing cloud services such as iCloud, Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Services / CloudDrive or more traditional players like Google and Microsoft.

Cloud services are common for things like, website and application hosting, email/office applications, sales force lead management and off-site backup and storage. As always, easyTechCare can provide expertise to help you make the right decision for your home or business from a whole host of cloud providers.

“Cloud” computing isn’t new, but it has been getting increasing focus and publicity as of late.  Companies have used software as a service and consumers have used hosted email (Hotmail, Yahoo, Rogers, Sympatico and Gmail) for years. With the increasing speed of internet access for consumers and small businesses as well as the growing variety of services available, adoption of cloud services has been growing rapidly in recent years. There are many advantages to using services in the cloud including:

•  Security, Redundancy and backups are provided by the provider, ensuring that it always works for you
• Pay for only the services/storage that you need
• More frequent updates
• Less reliance on user updates reducing time and cost
•  Data available from anywhere, on any computer
•  Potentially able to access information from any device with a browser including mobile

As with any technology there are always things to consider. Depending on what you are using cloud services for, there are different things to consider. Always make sure that the provider has regular backups and redundancy built in - you wouldn’t want to lose any critical information. As information is stored on remote servers, consider how critical it is to have immediate access to your data.

The advantage is that you only need an internet connection but at the same time if you need to have access at a minutes’ notice, there are several potential “weak links”. Your internet connection could have an issue, you can be in an area without internet (another office, subway, train, airplane etc…) or the provider can experience issues. These cases are often unlikely but you should consider all scenarios.

You also need to consider data security if you are storing sensitive data. All of the large providers take security very seriously as it is the backbone of their services, but in the last few years there have been a few high profile breaches (this is often a bigger concern for business than consumers), so it is something to be aware of. In reality, for most organizations the weak link in security are their employees. This can be either intentional or unintentional through viruses on computers or using the same username and password repeatedly (with common words such as birthdates or the company name). If this is an issue there are ways to encrypt data before it is uploaded through a variety of tools-just make sure the proper procedures are in place before you begin.

If you are archiving large files like images, videos and/or music you must also assess your internet contract. Most consumers have a cap on their monthly traffic after which you pay per GB, so be conscious of how much you are using (especially in the first month).

Let easyTechCare provide the expertise to help you make the right decision for you or your business (Computer Network Help) from a whole host of cloud providers. If you are looking at setting up cloud services (Computer Networking Services) or switching your existing technology to the cloud, there are lots of references available. Many experts and cloud companies have videos, whitepapers or articles, but just be aware of the source (or bias) and if they offer cloud services themselves.

Additional Resources:

Akamai is one of the largest cloud organizations as its technology manages about 20% of the entire internet by hosting content.

http://www.ted.com/pages/266

Amazon web services offers a host of applications within its cloud network infrastructure.

http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Overview.pdf