By Lori McGinnis Black, Midland Business Journal – April 8, 2011
Cloud computing is a booming trend in companies today.
“Small to midsize businesses find that using cloud computing is working well for them,” said Gregg Pickens, president and owner of Digital Dot Systems.
“Companies are using cloud computing in several ways,” according to Kim Whittaker, vice president of sales and marketing at First National Technology Solutions.
“Different types of cloud s exist,” indicated Don Gray, chief security strategist for Omaha-based information security company Solutionary.
“The newest trend in cloud computing is using a private cloud,” said Hanna Smitterberg, CEO of Cost Effective Technologies.
“Cloud computing is using the Internet for off-site services,” Pickens said. “Companies use it for many purposes, with the most common uses being for backup and disaster recovery and backing up a server to a remote location,” he said.
“Digital Dot’s customers find that cloud computing is useful when computer issues arise,” Pickens said. “Technicians can simply to go the Internet to resolve computer-related issues without having to travel on-site to the company premises.”
“Cloud computing is a relative new technology,” Pickens said. “It started to appear over the last coupld of years. The main downside of cloud computing occurs when companies don’t have enough bandwidth, which can make computer processes slower.”
“Some companies are using cloud computing for their production systems,” Whittacker said. “Instead of purchasing server hardware and computing capacity, they leverage cloud computing providers and contract for the amount of server capacity they need. This allows them to scale the capacity of the computing resources very easily as their business requirements change.”
According to Whittaker, other companies will use cloud computing for testing applications and business functionality or for applications development projects. This allows companies to contract for the computing capacity they require for short periods of time. “The cloud allows (companies) to only pay for the resources for when they use the server capacity and the company does not need to purchase hardware for a test or development environment, “she said.
“Cloud lingo includes terms such as SaaS, or software as a service in which users “rent” a software package,” Solutionary’s Gray said. “PaaS, or platform as a service, allows users to rent a collection of bandwidth, servers and storage with Windows or Linux operating systems, and provide a Web and database functionality”, he said.
Gray also noted Iaas, or infrastructure as a service, is the renting of a collection of hardware, routers, firewalls, servers and storage. He also explained the difference between the private and public clouds: “Private cloud is the ownership of the application within the organization, while a public cloud is when applications are owned by a third party and shared with other organizations.”
“Companies are beginning to build private clouds within their organization to reduce costs across the IT spectrum and deliver a higher quality computing platform to their various business units while experiencing economies of scale,” Gray said.
“Using a private cloud is the latest advancement in cloud computing,” CET’s Smitterberg said. With a public cloud, numerous companies use resources over the Internet from a provider. Some companies are not comfortable with that,” she said. “There’s a huge convergence of the need for private cloud services. With a private cloud, Web-enabled applications are built exclusively for one user and isolated from the users. A private cloud will allow users to customize their information and sensitive documents without any concerns that others will see them,” she said.
“Overall,” Smitterberg said, “cloud computing can cost 20 percent to 60 percent less than buying hardware and software for an individual computer and paying to support its continued operation.”
