What cloud am I computing to?

People always like to tell me I have my head in the clouds; well guess what?  Now it’s the only place to be… Let me explain!

Depending on your involvement with business computing, you may have heard the current buzz word “Cloud computing”. There are numerous definitions for cloud computing but simply put it’s online services and applications that are accessed through your web browsers. Online services offer several advantages over standard hardware computing: they are not hardware driven and web browser access means that applications are available whether you own a MAC or a PC. Most of you are already aware of web based applications if you have a Hotmail, MSN, Gmail, Yahoo, Comcast, or other web based email accounts.

In conjunction with “Cloud Computing” is “collaboration”. Recently someone told me that they didn’t need to all this new stuff because they weren’t sharing anyway. File sharing has been around since the beginning of the computer age but this new technology simplifies and incorporates more than just sharing music files or photos. More directly, it can help you communicate with staff, vendors, and clients regarding pricing changes, inventory updates and policy changes. Not to mention changing how you engage with clients regarding discussion boards, finding common solutions to common problems, or transmitting secure documents. These are only a few examples of sharing that can be done online; establishing a more participatory relationship besides just sharing documents and document version control.

From a network infrastructure perspective, Briscoe Network Solutions is an online company; our email is a Google premier account allowing us to use our domain name, our web site/blog is a stand alone WordPress application and our email mailing list is managed by SugarCRM. The Google premier account costs $50/year per email address and both WordPress and SugarCRM are open source applications; meaning they are free to download.

Over the next several months we will explore various online solutions with examples and we’d like you to follow along with us. Our intent is to find new or different applications that will be helpful for small businesses or examples of how to use current applications in new ways.

Google Apps and Microsoft Business Productivity Online Services are some of the most familiar names in Cloud computing and we think the following articles will give you a beginning orientation:

Microsoft Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) http://www.microsoft.com/online/demo/demo.aspx

Google Apps, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJT3pagjd8s