If you run your own servers or have installed applications running on Windows desktop machines in your office, you know what a pain the neck it is keeping it all up-to-date and how much it costs for version upgrades.
That was the way the software world worked for decades. You bought software and installed it onto your machine and then had to keep it updated and compatible with the operating system, usually Windows, and other pieces of software that you used. If you don’t have an IT staff, this can be challenging. And installed software has other issues. You or people you work with can’t easily get to it from outside your office and if you have multiple computers, you have to update all of them.
Today, there’s a better, cheaper and simpler way to do things. It’s called Cloud Computing, or Software as a Service (SaaS). What it means is that instead of having to buy hardware and software and install and maintain it, you use your web browser to access a service that runs the application on servers somewhere out on the internet. You don’t know where and you don’t have to care where. The service provider takes care of version updates, backups and all the other maintenance tasks you have to take care of now, usually for a monthly fee that’s much less than what you’re paying for a software maintenance contract, not to mention the initial cost of the software and your own lost time and effort doing things that aren’t directly related to your business. And even if you have an IT staff, you’re paying them to take care of the problem for you. How much does one full-time employee cost?
Let’s take backups as an example. If you do your own backups you have to take care of physically storing the backup media in a safe place. If you use a large network drive for your backup, you have to be concerned about it crashing (all disk drives fail, it’s just a question of when).
Unless you produce many gigabytes of data every day, you can backup all your data to a service offered by Amazon called S3 (Simple Storage Service). It’s ridiculously cheap, only 15 cents/gigabyte/month. Most people have far less than 10 gigabytes of their own data that needs to be backed up. So for less than $1.50/month you can have the peace of mind that your data is safe, offsite at S3. And since Amazon has thousands of users of S3, they can afford bulletproof security, redundant servers and power and their own backups. So even your backup is backed up!
I can help you determine if cloud solutions would be right for your business and help you choose the right ones.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice fill someone in on and this mail helped me alot in my college assignement. Thank you on your information.
Very informative post. Thanks for taking the time to share your view with us.