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Cloud Computing Still Confusing to Small Businesses

cloud-computing-confusingOnly 28 percent of small-business owners completely understand the concept of cloud computing, while 42 percent of respondents said they are not using cloud computing at all and 35 percent said they were using it only for data storage, according to the latest “Brother Small-Business Survey,” from Brother International, which examined the role of technology in small business.

Small-business owners also noted using the cloud for document management (21 percent) as well as business applications like CRM and accounting and human resources (17 percent).

The study, conducted by Wakefield Research and based on a poll of 500 owners of U.S. businesses with less than 100 employees, revealed a surprising 75 percent of these small-business owners felt that a crashed computer was more disruptive than a sick employee, and 75 percent said that a tech malfunction had negatively affected their business through a missed deadline or opportunity.

“This year’s small-business survey found that technology is just as important as a healthy workforce,” John Wandishin, vice president of marketing for Brother, said in a statement. “The results emphasize the importance of delivering reliable and easy-to-use products to promote a productive working environment.”

When asked about business investments, 51 percent of small-business owners said that they prioritize technology tool-related capital investments, such as new software, mobile apps and cloud computing services. Machinery-related (21 percent) and facility-related investments (20 percent) were other areas of priority.

The results indicated that while technology plays a vital role in terms of office productivity, 66 percent of small-business owners said they are frequently overwhelmed by the amount of technology available to help them run their businesses, and 86 percent additionally noted that in the past year, office productivity suffered due to technology not working properly. Nearly a third (31 percent) of respondents went so far as to say that they would give up a week’s worth of vacation to ensure tech malfunctions never happened in their business again.

The survey measured a slight uptick (48 percent, compared with 44 percent in 2012) in small-business owners feeling the need to stockpile cash to help guarantee that they could survive any economic downturn. However, 52 percent said they believe that investing in their businesses can give them an advantage over competitors.

While stress levels among small-business owners remained high in general (58 percent in 2013, versus 55 percent in 2012), survey results indicated “extreme stress” seemed to be down. The percentage of those claiming their stress levels are at their highest ever (13 percent) is down almost half from last year (24 percent). However, 41 percent of small-business owners felt that 2012 turned out worse than expected.

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Cloud Computing Tips For Small Businesses

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Jonathan Edwards, managing director of Harrogate-based YorkshireCloud.co.uk, a cloud computing service tailored for SMEs, gives his tips on harnessing the power of the cloud.

1. Cloud computing is 100 per cent reliant on an internet connection, so you should always have a plan of what to do when your main connection fails. A cost effective method for smaller companies is to buy a 3G capable router and pay around £10 per month for a broadband dongle. For larger organisations, always have more than one internet connection.

2. Make sure you’re certain that all your company applications and software will work in the new cloud environment. Moving most of your IT into the cloud and then spending £8,000 on a new onsite server, because one of your applications doesn’t work, is a waste of time, money and effort.

3. Most people don’t know that cloud computing can be delivered using several different pieces of technology. These products have different pros and cons but more importantly, different pricing. SMEs can be more at risk of being talked into paying over the odds for wonderful technology that won’t be used. Make sure you receive clear and understandable advice on what’s best for your organisation.

4. More often than not, you will be charged per gigabyte of data that you host in the cloud. It is always best to cleanse your data before you migrate. You will probably find data that isn’t needed anymore or can be archived onto different media. As an entrepreneur, you might blur the boundaries between your company and home sometimes, but is your business’s server really the right place for your wedding video?

5. Cloud computing becomes a utility similar to your electricity and you pay for what you use. If you have ten users, you pay for ten users. Make sure you understand exactly what your tariff consists of. How much are you paying per gigabyte of data? You don’t want any nasty surprises at the month end.

6. If your current IT company lets you down, then you can hire another one. It’s not as easy in the cloud. Your provider holds all your data. Make sure you ask them how long it takes for them to respond to any problems and ask if they have an uptime guarantee. It should be 99 per cent. Anything less reliable could be crippling for a small business.

7. Six months after you’ve bought a new server for the office and replaced all your PCs isn’t the right time to make a move into the cloud. Consider cloud when your hardware and software are ageing and a refresh is needed.

8. Google and Microsoft are big cloud providers; but where is your data being kept? Somewhere in Europe or somewhere in the world is the best answer you’ll get. SMEs might consider opting for a cloud provider who can tell you exactly where your valuable company data is kept and even take you to the data centre if needed.

9. Cloud computing is a service. Don’t be forced into long contracts. There is absolutely no reason why you should be signing a three or five-year contract with your provider. You should be able to leave freely with a month’s notice.

10. Many cloud providers don’t provide IT support. As an SME, there will still inevitably be times when you need help with IT issues like printers or the internet connection in your office. Make sure you try and chose a provider who includes this in your monthly fees.

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Cloud Is The Only Way To Go For SMBs

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The cloud computing model represents an important change in how information technology works. Just as the major changes that happened first with the client-server application model and then with the Internet, the drivers of this new revolution are accessibility and cost – how can computing infrastructure, platforms and applications have more widespread usage and how can they be made cheaper. In fact, price and accessibility go hand-in-hand: the cheaper technology becomes, the more people will use it.

These two drivers are especially valuable for small businesses. By making technology cheaper, the cloud allows more small businesses to adopt IT solutions – from simple e-mail and applications to more complex projects – leading to leaner and more profitable companies. The cloud has also brought a proliferation of service providers, and this gives businesses more options when choosing their vendors.

The advantages of pay-as-you-go for SMBs

The cloud computing model is furthering the shift from products to services that started in IT some years ago. The end-product of this is the pay-as-you-go model for everything, from infrastructure and servers to software applications. In this model, the user only has to pay for the resources used over the course of a given period, such as a month. This means, for instance, that a small business can pay for storage as their storage needs grow, instead of having to buy storage based on growth projections. The same thing goes for processing power, server instances and even application licenses.

This is important for small businesses for several different reasons. First, for a lot of them, making any kind of projections about how their IT needs will grow over time is usually very hard. Even large companies have trouble managing their operations, as evidenced by Wal-Mart’s recent troubles. For smaller companies, predicting future needs is even more difficult. A sudden growth in popularity due to word-of-mouth advertising may bring so many visitors to a small business’s web site that it becomes unresponsive, generating frustration amongst potential customers and having a negative result, instead of a positive one. With the elastic, pay-as-you-go model of the cloud, any small business can have access to easily (or even automatically) scalable computing platforms, reducing the risks of downtime and the need for accurate projections.

Another major advantage of the pay-as-you-go model is that it transforms expenditures in IT from investments into expenses. This means that companies no longer have to buy a new server. They can, instead, pay for a cloud server instance on a monthly basis. This greatly reduces the costs of going into business. As an added benefit, some of the major cloud providers have “free tiers”, focused on small usage scenarios, which means that recently started businesses can have access to top-level providers for free.

Finally, this model solves a major problem of small businesses: the fact that a lot of them fail. If a small company makes an investment in software and hardware and then goes out of business for any reason, it has no way of recovering that investment, since there isn’t much of a market for used servers, desktops or software licenses. By adopting cloud solutions, however, a company can shut down its operations and cancel software licenses at the click of a button. This means, in addition to having to make no investment in the first place, no leftovers if the company goes under.

A deluge of data

An important side effect of the shift to the cloud is the proliferation of data that has become available for anyone to access. Not only are cloud services massive producers of data, usually about their availability, uptime and so on, but more and more services are opening up their data for consumption by others. It is possible today for even small companies to leverage data from several sources, such as Facebook and Google analytics, to improve their offerings and better reach their customers.

Although information is the lifeblood of any business, big or small, Big Data can have a much larger impact for small businesses and startups. By making use of this data, companies can better segment their customers and create more focused marketing campaigns, improving the return on investments. For companies with a more limited marketing budget, having a better response rate to advertisement can make all the difference in the world.

If companies had to depend on traditional data analysis tools to utilize the generated data, costs would be untenable. Fortunately, there are also cloud tools and services that allow anyone to process, make sense of, and extract knowledge from Big Data. With these services, small companies can improve their processes and even have better profits over time.

If I were opening a small business today…

I would definitely jump on the cloud bandwagon. The simple reduction in costs that can be achieved by using cloud-based solutions can make a huge difference in the budget of a new company. If we add this to the fact that by using cloud solutions companies are able to start operating much more quickly, and add it to the possibility to scale operations as needed, it becomes obvious that cloud is the way to go.

The cares that must be taken when hiring cloud services are the same that would need to be taken with any regular IT provider: make sure you need what you are buying, that you are getting a good price, and that your expectations match the service level offered. Information about different providers is only a Google search away, so do some research. In terms of costs vs. benefits, however, there is no other way to go.

Author:Thoran Rodrigues
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3 Reasons VoIP Make Sense for SMBs

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You are a small business, therefore, you need an easy way to communicate with your customers and vice versa. Picking a phone system that you can rely on is a complicated, tricky business, and not really something you want to hassle with at the end of the day.

Ultimately, the choice comes down to two options. A traditional phone system relies on phone lines that are connected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), on circuits operated by Private Branch Exchange (PBX) equipment. Secondly, a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider transmits your voice over the Internet as data. Ultimately, you have to judge what’s best for your company and, more importantly, what gets the job done most efficiently.

VoIP has a number of benefits over traditional, hard-line phone systems, and its statistics are impressive. Last year the FCC reported that use of VoIP increased 21%, to over 30 million VoIP subscribers in the U.S. alone.

But what are the real reasons behind its popularity? Here, I hope to target a few of the lesser-known reasons why VoIP can be useful for small businesses.

1. No More Wonky Phone Switches

In the past, running your business over a traditional phone system required a phone switch — a closet full of physical phone lines and hardware to run it. You had to hire a technical support person to manage all your company’s phone lines, and to fix the switch or support hardware when things went wrong.

Not only are phone switches and their maintenance expensive, but they are also slow and difficult to fix. Your system could be down for a significant amount of time before a technician arrives to diagnose and fix the problem – all the while losing productivity.

With VoIP, the system is the phone switch. The provider’s network transmits voice data over the Internet (like email and web data), and replaces the switch entirely.

Why is this important? Aside from more space in your office, VoIP gives you a host of features that are difficult to access using a traditional hard-line system, for instance, making calls from your computer or laptop, and forwarding calls to your mobile phone. New features like these are easily integrated into your VoIP system as they become available, and don’t require any new hardware installs or complicated tech support manuals.

2. Better Remote Customer Support

Old-fashioned office phone lines are supported by old-fashioned companies built on legacy phone systems that are 30 to 50-years old. These companies operate on business models that were developed for last-century markets. This makes it difficult to respond to the needs of your business quickly and easily. Customers of traditional phone companies often complain about complicated or time-consuming customer interfaces and un-integrated service offerings.

VoIP vendors are next-generation service providers built on the most up-to-date systems. They are hip to web-based software, and can respond to changes in the market more quickly than traditional phone companies.

VoIP vendors have web-based customer support, as well as over-the-phone help. The VoIP customer service model can eliminate the need for a technician’s visit, and can minimize delays in problem-solving. Customers love how quickly and easily they can get VoIP up and running for their businesses, and are astounded by the difference of service, compared to what they’ve come to expect from traditional telecom providers. With the proper network and the right provider, it can be as easy as plugging an Ethernet cable into your VoIP phone.

3. More User-Friendly for Employees

Remember struggling to forward a call on your traditional phone system? Have you ever forgotten your password to access your work voicemail remotely? Did you master call-forwarding, sending calls to your mobile number when you were away from your desk?

Traditional telecom providers offer these features, but they are difficult for your employees to figure out. Your employees are web and mobile savvy, and dealing with complicated phone interfaces frustrates them to no end.

VoIP technology is integrated into systems that you and your employees are already using, like the web and mobile devices. Management portals that are customizable to your business provide a simplified interface to administer your communication needs.

Call forwarding is much easier (no more crazy codes and # signs) with integrated find-me, follow-me features that allow your employees to get incoming calls at different locations, on different phones. Employees can access their voicemail from email or have it sent to their mobile phones. No longer do they have to remember their passwords when they call their work voicemail.

Some VoIP customers have found it effective to train a few employees on the administrator features and then provide instructions so the entire staff can manage their own account settings. These user-friendly features are more aligned with the values that today’s mobile, agile workers have come to expect.

With cutting-edge functionality, easy-to-use features and an enhanced customer support experience, VoIP is especially suited to the needs of small business. VoIP systems are flexible enough to respond to the needs and changes of your small business, and will bolster your business communications and productivity alongside the systems that you and your employees are already using.

Author:Chris Moody
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VoIP and the Future of Small Business Collaboration

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Just a few years ago, the small business tech catch phrase was Voice over IP (VoIP). By now VoIP is the standard in telephony. A Computer Economics study shows that by 2009, nearly 60 percent of organizations had adopted VoIP and more than half are investing in VoIP. The initial draw for small businesses to make the switch to VoIP related to cost savings — namely, there are no toll charges or long distance fees with VoIP. Now many IT managers wonder, what’s next for VoIP?

While the technology hasn’t changed, the number, quality and maturity of VoIP applications has grown. The answer to the “what’s next” question centers not around the technology itself but the unified communications applications businesses can use over the VoIP platform: immersive telepresence, IM, soft phones and video can now all run over the same IP network as the voice service. In fact, VoIP will be a key platform to support new business needs and processes as employees’ work methods continue to evolve. VoIP can become a keystone in a small business’s unified communications suite.

The Future Lies in Collaboration

Video conferencing, made possible by VoIP, is the future of corporate communication. Video conferencing enables collaboration between employees while they’re working remotely, while simultaneously cutting travel costs. And at a moment’s notice, you can hold that important face-to-face meeting with a top client, without all of the associated planning and travel costs of an in-person meeting.

VoIP will also make everyday business processes simpler. Think about how your organization collaborates on document edits, for example. Perhaps one employee saves a file and sends it to another for review. Inevitably, there’s the headache of multiple versions and identifying which one is up-to-date and includes everyone’s edits.

With communication-enabled business processes run over VoIP, employees can work on a document simultaneously and collaborate over Web, video or IM. For small businesses with tight budgets and little time, improved business processes can be the difference between completing a project on time and going over budget.

Going Mobile with Wireless VoIP

Mobility is a major competitive advantage for today’s small business workforce. As the number of teleworking and work-at-home employees increases, wireless VoIP is quickly becoming a necessity. The biggest benefit of wireless VoIP for small businesses is giving employees one phone number where they can be reached no matter where they’re located.

Single-number access is a risk-avoidance measure that’s worth taking. Previously, when an employee was away from the office he or she would give customers his or her cell phone number to be reached remotely. This may not seem like a problem, but it means that the customer will have the employee’s cell phone number after said employee leaves the company, which could potentially be harmful to business.
User-friendly Open Source VoIP

Open source options, for any technology, have always been more affordable from a licensing standpoint, but they can be more difficult to implement. Though open source offers a lot of room for customization, it can be intimidating for those not intimately familiar with the technology.

With VoIP, there are some open source options coming out on the market that are more user-friendly. For instance, businesses can now buy a pre-built appliance that includes traditional applications plus the flexibility inherent in open source options. This can be a good fit for smaller businesses with a smaller budget.

It is helpful to think of open source VoIP options in comparison to the operating system world, where most people consider Linux as the main open source platform. For example, when comparing Linux to Windows, they both have the same inherent feature set, but there is only so much customization possible with Windows.

While Windows offers a rich, thoroughly-tested feature set, Linux gives users the option to turn on or off many features. Open source VoIP solutions offer that same functionality, allowing customers to enable or disable many features that they would be locked into with standard solutions.

Tips When Considering VoIP for Small Business

New uses for VoIP may seem straightforward but, as with any technology, it pays to be prepared and think things through before you dive in. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind.

  • Today’s networks have improved capabilities, but bandwidth is still a commodity. As technology progresses, network service providers have adapted to new kinds of traffic to deliver faster speeds. One of the keys to running new VoIP applications is that speed – and the capability to prioritize voice traffic over normal data traffic, such as email or downloads. Voice traffic is classified as high-priority so that end users do not experience problems, such as choppy calls. Network providers achieve this by enabling Quality of Service (QoS), which assigns different priority to different types of network traffic. Be sure your provider can support the applications you’re moving onto their system.
  • Security is always a concern for small businesses, and IT managers will have to be especially vigilant with new applications of VoIP. These applications often enable new forms of communication for small businesses, and it is important to capture every piece of communication to ensure both secure connections and compliance to company policies. For instance, the capability to save IM correspondences will allow you to ensure employees adhere to your company policies

VoIP has moved beyond being an affordable alternative to traditional telephony to become the standard platform for unified communications. If your business’s network can support it, VoIP will help your employees collaborate, be more efficient and effectively work remotely.

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Mitigating The Risks Of Cloud Computing

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One of the few sure things in the online world is Amazon.com. The site never seems to go down, despite the fact that it’s serving millions of customers every day.

Yet even the mighty Amazon — or, more accurately, its cloud services unit, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud — collapsed in April for about 24 hours, taking with it customers like Reddit, foursquare, Hootsuite and hundreds of other websites, some of them run by small businesses.

The outage shows that, no matter the size and brand name, cloud services aren’t 100-percent trustworthy. If your business relies on a cloud service, particularly if you’re in the type of industry that can’t tolerate any outages, it’s imperative to come up with a “Plan B.”

Mitigate the Risks of Cloud Computing

Patrick Gray, president of Prevoyance Group, an IT consulting firm, says there’s an obvious appeal to working with a known cloud provider, but if you’re a small company, don’t expect great customer service. “They might gently giggle under their breath if you call to complain,” says Gray. The alternative is to work with a smaller, hungrier provider, but then your chances of a blackout are probably greater.

In other words, there’s no safe haven in cloud computing, so the best you can do is prepare yourself. You can’t ignore the advantages the cloud offers, but you can learn to mitigate the risks. Gray and other experts suggest taking the following precautions:

  • Carefully review cloud service contracts. Dazzled by cloud technology, most small to midsize businesses accept boilerplate contracts that protect the cloud purveyors from any liability. “Instead of accepting those, push for protections against service outages,” says Gray.
  • Do your homework about the cloud service vendor. Get a third party to check them out. Ask about their past incidents, outages and downtime. “Make sure their levels of service match your business requirements,” says Charles King, principal analyst of Pund-IT.
  • Simplify your use of cloud services. Evan Cooke, co-founder and CTO of Twilio, an API provider, noted in a blog post after Amazon’s cloudpocalypse that Twilio wasn’t affected. One major reason for this is because Twilio built simple services run by a single host rather than ones using multiple hosts.
  • Build redundancies into your system. Cooke recommends having software quickly identify failures and retry requests. “By running multiple redundant copies of each service, one can use quick timeouts and retries to route around failed or unreachable services,” he writes.

Be a Smart Cloud Shopper

Of course, not every small business has the luxury of rejiggering their software in case of a cloud service outage. Until now, most people have expected services from big cloud purveyors like Amazon to work all the time. Since that will probably never be a reality, the best approach is to try to wring as many concessions as possible out of your cloud partner before you sign a contract. As King says, “This is just like any other kind of shopping.”

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Small Businesses Lack Knowledge About Cloud Computing

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“You don’t know what you don’t know” might be the expression most appropriate for small to medium-size businesses (SMB) when it comes to the benefits of technology and their business, according to an independent survey of more than 500 SMB decision makers released at National Small Business Week. The study, commissioned by Verio Inc., a provider of online business solutions to SMBs worldwide, showed that more than two-thirds of respondents are uncertain if they will purchase a cloud solution in the near future.

However, despite this lack of knowledge, respondents seek the benefits of a cloud offering, with 21 percent citing the ability to share resources and 20 percent citing on-demand resources as important, showcasing a need for education on cloud benefits specific to small businesses. With the proper knowledge and education on cloud technology, 20 percent of decision makers stated they were “likely” or “very likely” to implement a cloud computing solution in the next twelve months while almost ten percent were “likely” or “very likely” to implement in the next three months.

“This data clearly demonstrates that there continues to be a need for educating SMBs on the benefits of cloud and more importantly, correlating those benefits to their current IT requirements,” said Mitch Merrifield, senior director of managed computing solutions for Verio. “SMBs want to drive efficiencies, and cloud technologies are some of the most innovative solutions to assist them in doing that.”

The survey also found that 19 percent of SMB decision makers are looking to cut technology costs, an improvement from 30 percent from last year, so the SMB appetite to purchase IT solutions continues to grow. Other findings include a sustained focus on building out and maintaining IT infrastructure as well.

“There are several considerations, including use cases, benefits, applications and purchasing, when SMBs are deciding how to best implement IT solutions such as Cloud,” said Merrifield. “We believe as their understanding of these key factors and benefits evolve, this will significantly contribute to the adoption of Cloud technologies in 2011 and beyond.”

A recent report found SMBs are beginning to move toward cloud-based backup (as opposed to traditional technologies) to protect their company data. According to a Forrester Research survey whose goal was to discover the drivers for the move to cloud-based recovery tech versus traditional on-premises solutions, five percent of survey respondents indicated they use cloud-based backup today and 38 percent plan to employ cloud backup within two years, while 68 percent of respondents said they plan to move toward cloud-based backup to reduce costs.

Nearly half (48 percent) said they are moving to cloud-backup because they are more comfortable with the security of their data in these new environments. Speed of implementation/deployment was also cited (32 percent) as the reason for moving to the cloud.

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Cloud Computing for Small Business 101

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Many small businesses are still uncertain about cloud computing and wonder if it can help boost profitability without being extremely risky. To figure it out, it’s best to start by defining cloud computing in small business terms. There are two commonly agreed upon types of cloud computing: 1) software-as-a-service and 2) infrastructure-as-a-service.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) refers to cloud computing where the software you would normally install on your office computers is instead delivered over the Internet.

The most commonly recognised software application is CRM (customer relationship management). Last year 26% of spending on CRM was for SaaS versions, and this is expected to grow to 33% by 2015, according to Experian.

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing is where you rent space in a data centre and use their servers rather than buying new hardware to run your business. A common example of IaaS is website hosting.

You may also hear terminology like “public cloud” or “private cloud.” Simply, the public cloud is where shared resources are used outside of your company and delivered over the Internet. The private cloud is where you build a shared infrastructure within your company and deliver services over the internal network to users within your company, without installing software on their individual systems.

Starting in the Cloud

Many small businesses that started in the last ten years may not realise that their business has already started utilising aspects of cloud computing – email and websites, for instance.

When an entrepreneur starts a business the first IT consideration, after buying that first computer, is typically setting up an email address, likely followed by setting up a web site. Purchasing a server probably doesn’t make it to the list for some time. In fact, 90% of small businesses do not own a server.

So where do small businesses go for their email service and website hosting? Usually to their ISP (Internet Service Provider) which includes it as part of a package. These are simply applications and shared resources delivered over the public cloud and fundamental to business operation.

As the business grows, it may make sense to purchase a dedicated server that runs the email and web servers – but initially, the business began in the cloud. And now, advancements in technology will likely take them back to the cloud. The need for expansion and flexibility coupled with increased cost control requires the smart small business owner to search for IT alternatives.

Over the past few years, cloud services have developed to a point where most, if not all, software vendors have developed and released their applications as a service. For example, consider the cloud products from Sage, Intuit and MYOB. Or, think about the expansion of Microsoft to include Office365 and a suite of hosted platforms for their communication and collaboration suite.

Then take cloud start-up companies that have gone mainstream like SalesForce.com. When you throw in heavy weights like Google and their Google Apps service, you can see the clear direction and evolution for cloud computing for small businesses.

On the flip side, we tend to hear a few arguments against cloud adoption, such as data security (as recently illustrated by Sony’s PSN hacking disaster), resources availability, bandwidth speed and cost, and general trust issues.

Availability of Resources

When small businesses were using their ISP for email and web hosting, were they concerned about email not being available? Perhaps it wasn’t an issue then. But now that they have experienced sluggish email systems or server overloads (after moving to their own dedicated server), there are some concerns that going to the cloud may mean more downtime due to a lack of control.

But a single server belonging to a small business may struggle to run the email, website, file store, backup, security management, finance and accounting packages – and to top it all off, in many cases, servers are managed by staff members with no formal IT training.

This means a server is prone to more downtime and instability than, say, an application, delivered securely over the Internet, hosted on a server farm with the latest equipment, and managed and maintained 24×7 by experts.

And what about the issues that can occur on a local server when one application provider updates their software? If that update doesn’t ‘play nice’ with the other applications installed, then your business could grind to a halt. Cloud services work independently, so software update conflict issues are a thing of the past.

When you consider the types of applications delivered via the cloud, some are more likely to be used by businesses that are most concerned about availability. Many applications have offline caching, meaning a copy can be stored locally and then synced later when online. So even if the Internet is not available, they can continue to work.

Endpoint security (the virus scanner on desktops, laptops and servers) is another application that could be a re-entry point to the cloud. It’s the management component and the threat databases that are stored in the cloud. The scanner still sits locally, so if a connection is not available your scanners can still defend against local threats. Keep in mind though that over 90% of threats today come via the Internet, so without a connection you are already potentially 90% safer.

Cost vs. Speed vs. Productivity

For many developed market regions, cost versus speed versus productivity is a concern that never gets raised. However, across Australia, New Zealand, Asia parts of Eastern Europe, and Latin America the cost and speed of accessing large amounts of information back and forth over the Internet are valid concerns.

Small business owners tend to be concerned about the availability of services as opposed to cloud-related issues such as security, data ownership and data privacy.

While this concern is true for many applications, the cloud should not be ruled out totally by small business purely based on these reasons. When applications like website hosting, mail server hosting, and computer antivirus and security are offloaded to the cloud, it can free up the resources on your network. This means the tools you leave onsite are free to perform better.

How often does a small business owner need to log into the management console of their security system? Let’s face it, daily email alerts and weekly reports are probably sufficient. And if an email travels through a server on the Internet versus locally, it still travels the same distance and at the same speed as it comes across the wire (except for internal emails. In a small business, it’s probably quicker to lean across the desk and talk to the person anyway.)

Is My Data Really Safe?

Securing data is a critical concern to service providers. Some countries have regulations that govern the storage and transmission of confidential information, not to mention the power of the customer to take their business elsewhere if bad press follows data breach.

Some businesses are also concerned with the location of the data centre. Is it in my backyard? Or, is it in some far-flung, low-cost country where government controls and infrastructure are not as well defined?

This is a very valid concern. How does a business truly know where its data is stored? The answer is, it probably doesn’t. That is the nature of the Internet. In order for a service provider to provide an always-on, always-available service, it needs to have multiple data centres with high availability and failsafe capabilities. So if something happens to one set of servers, the next set can take up the slack. In order to do this, your data is probably stored and shared in multiple locations, even in multiple countries.

You should be asking your service provider for the details about their primary and secondary data centres and if there are any redundancy plans. This will help you see where your data may or may not be stored. You then need to make a judgment call based on your level of trust in that provider from both an availability and security perspective.

Think about where your business has come from; what you require in terms of resources to take it to the next level; and how you plan to use technology moving forward. You’ll begin to see why research and general industry chatter predicts Small Business adoption of cloud computing will grow at staggering rates over the next 18 months.

The Small Business journey to the cloud is actually more of a round trip. It’s important to keep this in mind when you make your next IT investment decision.

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Cloud Services Beg for Nimbler Management

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Traditional systems management has been obscured in large part by the advent of cloud, where, after all, the promise is cheap, automated infrastructure you don’t have to manage, just use. But as the public cloud paradigm has proven out, more and more businesses, both small and large, want to replicate that success in their own operations.

For some small businesses, the case for cloud is pretty obvious. Chuck Spalding, a hydrogeologist with McDonald Morrissey Associates, Inc., said his firm needed to run complex calculations on data and turn it into useful models of groundwater resources. They ran simulations on their workstations, but depending on the size of the project, it could take days to crank out the end result. Spalding said they felt the pinch, and his competitors had solved the problem traditionally.

“There’s a guy who put in 94 servers in his office to do this,” he said.

Spalding had no interest in following that route; aside from the cost of buying equipment, he’d end up sinking valuable time into networking, operating and managing all those systems. Cloud computing seemed like an ideal answer.

“I’d read about GoGrid in some of our trade magazines as a way to approach this,” he said. Experimenting with GoGrid made it clear that while Spalding was trading out onsite IT chores for easy access to virtual machines, managing it by hand was still clunky.

“Say I start 50 machines,” he said. “I still have to go to each one, put in my password, upload the data and set them to run.”

Spalding is experimenting with a new breed of management tools expressly designed around the Infrastructure as a Service paradigm; he uses enStratus to automate the jobs he pushes out to the cloud. And because he has essentially unlimited capacity at his fingertips, rush jobs are now possible.

Eventually, Spalding would like to break out the cost of data processing on client invoices as a courtesy. It’s a functionality that enStratus is working on; like most cloud management tools, it started out focusing on the ability to automate basic commands to multiple cloud services from a single interface.

For those in the online world, services like RightScale and Cloudkick (now owned by Rackspace) have had time to develop those sophisticated features, whereas software tools like EnStratus are developing alongside cloud interest from the enterprise perspective.

The next level of cloud management

Some services come at it from the other direction. Eric Gauthier, an IT administrator for Washington state credit union BECU (originally the Boeing Employees Credit Union), has got a full plate; financial systems, business systems, office systems and outside services, like the vendors BECU uses for secure online banking for its customers. All of that needs managing, and since the bank’s IT infrastructure is about as virtualized as it gets, he’s looking at cloud computing techniques that are on the next level. Mostly, he’d like to get rid of the manual chores or managing demand.

“The middle of the month and the end of month can get very heavy for us in terms of usage,” he said.

Gauthier said it’s not a question of immediate need for something new, like Chuck Spalding’s situation; it’s about squeezing more and more automation into existing infrastructure. BECU uses workload automation tools from UC4 to manage some of its important financial systems, and Gauthier said that a new release (Automation Platform v9) from the vendor is a step in that direction.

The new software includes job scheduling, policy-based automation, analytics, support to run commands from VMware’s vCenter for his virtual machines, and other features that bump it up past ground-level systems management. More streamlined operations mean less time spent hovering over a console around the middle of every month and more time innovating.

“This is what will eventually get us to private cloud,” he said.

As cloud grows, management concerns heighten

“From a ‘how do I acquire and deploy systems’ perspective, management has become a rapidly accelerating concern,” said Dennis Drogseth, analyst at Enterprise Management Associates, “especially in terms of the those involved in the role of IT and priority changes in how services are delivered.”

Drogseth recently completed new research that backs up this trend. Where the rubber meets the road for cloud in the enterprise is exactly at the level cloud computing is supposed to improve: actual day-to-day operations. EMA surveyed a swath of IT decision-makers and found that not only was cloud top of mind, it was complex and changing operational norms.

Almost 80% of the respondents said they were in the process of building hybrid models for IT services that would mix and match private infrastructure with outside services and public clouds. Almost half said that they expected cloud to bring significant changes to process flow, along with how they looked at and adopted systems management tools.

Drogseth said that this is par for the course in technology adoption. Many business users have waited out or been oblivious to the hype around cloud, but now we’re beginning to see technologies appear that are relevant to the real world and not just the online marketplace.

“Cloud seems to be accelerating the need for intelligent, top-down service management both politically and technologically, even if much of the initial hype had a sixties flavor of ‘tune in, drop out and put it in the cloud’ behind it,” Drogseth wrote in his report “Operationalizing cloud: The move towards a cross-domain service management strategy.”

Drogseth anticipates that cloud computing is going to be a robust part of the systems management marketplace in two to five years, with vendors stratifying out small and medium-sized business users with one-size fits-all point services and larger vendors willing to engage in cross platform, cross-cloud customization. Early efforts are certainly underway: Microsoft has pitched its new System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) as a central, single tool for everything Microsoft sells into the data center, including Hyper-V, Azure deployments and regular server management.

Meanwhile, IBM has expanded its venerable Tivoli management platform to cover VMware and other platforms and HP claims that it will deliver OpenView/Opsware-based cloud platforms. Of course, none of that is fully baked yet, with all the major vendors pointing to the end of the year and beyond for fulfillment and startups and smaller cloud management suites busily maturing. The change will be gradual but ultimately undeniable.

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Four in 10 Small Businesses Planning Cloud Computing

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Almost 40 per cent of SMEs expect to be paying for one or more cloud services within three years, according to a Microsoft report.

The IT vendor announced the results of its third annual worldwide study into how SMEs will use cloud services over the next three years. A total of 3,258 companies with 2-250 employees were surveyed in 16 countries.

The survey found that 39 per cent of SMEs expect to be paying for one or more cloud services within three years, an increase of 34 per cent from today (29 per cent).

SMEs are most likely to have a hybrid IT environment, using the cloud for workloads such as business-class email, collaboration, accounting and payroll, according to the report. The number of cloud services SMEs pay for will nearly double in most countries over the next three years, it noted.

Other findings of the report include:

-Those SMEs paying for cloud services will be using 3.3 services – up from less than two services today

-82 per cent of SMEs say that buying cloud services from a provider with local presence is important

-The larger the business, the more likely it is to pay for cloud services. For example, 56 per cent of companies with 51-250 or more employees may pay for an average of 3.7 services in three years’ time

Marco Limena, a vice president of business channels at Microsoft, said: “Cloud adoption will be gradual, and SMEs will continue to operate using a hybrid model with an increasing blend between off-premises and traditional on-premises infrastructure, for the foreseeable future.”

“As cloud computing becomes more ubiquitous and SMEs’ existing IT becomes outdated, adoption will grow rapidly. Hosting service providers should consider the appropriate sales, delivery and support models to target larger SME customers that are more likely to pay for cloud services.”

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