Managed Cloud Solutions Are Your Business Edge

By: John Shepler

Computing is a two-edged sword. One edge is the business purpose why you invested in technology in the first place. It may be the only way that a business such as yours can even exist. The other edge is what that technology does to hold you back. It sucks up massive amounts of capital and expenses. It requires special teams of experts to keep it going, especially if you require an uninterrupted online presence 24/7. Then, to add insult to injury, everything goes obsolete and needs to be replaced. Is there a way to gain the benefits of computing technology without the equal and opposite liabilities?

Enter The Managed Cloud
Gone are the days when you had to do everything yourself. Companies that have evolved their computing resources over the decades became complacent with the incremental creep of adding more and more central resources to support an ever growing and more sophisticated suite of applications. You don’t have to have it all in-house any more. It’s a choice.

The alternative is the managed cloud. Think of your data center as being magically levitated and swept away to a distant location. You still have all the needed resources at your disposal. They are just located somewhere else.

Isn’t that a zero-sum game? It can be, but if you do it right, you gain something through expertise, efficiency and economy of scale.

Do You NEED Cloud?
Managed services run the gamut from simple dedicated servers collocated in a massive data center to public, private and hybrid cloud services. Cloud and colocation might sound the same, but colocation servers are a relative fixed structure that takes time to physically upscale and downscale. Cloud services are based around hypervisors, software that can quickly increase or decrease resources as needed.

If your needs are simple and relatively unvarying, a dedicated server might be all you need. You can rent space and install your own equipment, or rent what you need from the data center, along with the technical support to set everything up and perform maintenance and repair as needed.

Where the cloud shines is applications with requirements that vary wildly. For example, you may run an online store that has seasonal or infrequent peaks of activity that dwarf the usual traffic levels. If you depend on buying and setting up more hardware servers, the peak opportunity may have come and gone before you have the additional resources in place. Your site will stall or crash, frustrating customers who will take their business elsewhere.

Choose Your Cloud Carefully
Cloud services generally fall into one of three categories: private, public and hybrid. A private cloud is something like a private dedicated server or your in-house data center, except for the extra ability to scale up and down rapidly. Cloud systems are based on virtualization that takes a pool of hardware resources and allocates the elements efficiently, based on need.

Private means that even through you are contracting for services from a remote provider, the environment is single-tenant. You are using these particular resources and not sharing with anyone else. That’s peace of mind knowing that your network, compute and storage resources are dedicated to your applications only.

Public clouds are called multi-tenant. There is an enormous pool of hardware resources that are divided up among many simultaneous users. Public clouds are popular because they offer a nearly infinite pool of computing and storage resources for any one user. It’s a more efficient way to allocate resources and is reflected in a lower cost to each user.

Hybrid clouds are a combination of public and private clouds. You run your most sensitive applications on the private cloud and general applications, such as ecommerce, on the public cloud. By mixing and matching to the performance and security requirements of your applications, you get the best of both worlds, without having to pay up for resources you aren’t using.

It’s Time For Your Cloud
You’re aware of the industry buzz. Everyone company seems to be heading to the cloud, if they aren’t already there. It’s a major paradigm shift in how computers are used by business. You must be automated and connected to be competitive. But, you don’t have to be in the business of buying, running, maintaining and upgrading all of that equipment and software.

The efficiency of cloud solutions can’t be underestimated. By paying only for what you use at the moment, you get out of the business of having to anticipate your future needs and taking the calculated risk of buying too much too soon or losing business because you underestimated. The cloud will let you react to business surges, steady growth, or the unfortunate need for downsizing, should the market conditions dictate.

Time to upgrade, find a more cost effective solution or dip your toe in the world of cloud hosted services. Many solutions and expert consultation are available right now.

Cloud On The Cheap

Larger companies are working on strategic initiatives to move their in-house data centers to the cloud. The advantages are both financial and the ability to work from just about any location, fixed or mobile. But what about smaller operations? Is there any way to gain some of these advantages for the SMB?

Here’s a cloud app that you may be overlooking because it was around long before the cloud was cool. You probably don’t even think “cloud” when you hear the name. Yet, cloud it is. The application? GoToMyPC.

GoToMyPC? Isn’t that the software that lets you remotely log into your computer? Indeed it is. Think about it, though. How much difference is there philosophically between bringing up the screen from your desktop PC while you are sitting at a restaurant, and then running all the apps that are back at the office, and running those same apps from a private cloud?

In this case, you have created your own private cloud without the need to contract for Infrastructure or Software as a Service.

The idea behind GoToMyPC is that you most likely have one major computing environment but would like to be able to use it wherever you happen to be. For smaller companies that primary computer is likely a PC running Windows or a Mac running OS X. Out in the field you may be accessing that computer with a laptop, notebook, netbook or even and iPad. Yes, if you are a GoToMyPC subscriber, there’s a free app for that in the iTunes App Store.

GoToMyPC might rightly be called a remote desktop. What it does is replicate the desktop of your base computer on a remotely located computer or iPad. You see just what you would if you were sitting at your desk. You can then run applications, look up data and even transfer files back and forth between your office PC and your remote PC.

How does it do that? The answer is in downloadable software that runs on the PC you want to access. It gives screen, keyboard and mouse access to the computer that you are logged into somewhere else. All of this is done over encrypted links so that you don’t lose security just because you are operating remotely.

Since this system depends on the computer you want to access rather than some server in the data center, you’ll need to leave your office machine on in order to gain access. But, hey, if you wanted to access any other cloud application the servers powering that app would have to be up and running. Strictly speaking, there is a GoToMyPC communications server that relays encrypted data packets between host and remote computers. You know, a cloud based server.

The PC to PC version of GoToMyPC has more features than the Mac version, but both give you remote access to either a Mac or PC from a Mac, PC or iPad. GoToMyPC has the ability to let you access up to 20 computers remotely. Larger companies can get a professional or corporate version that adds more users and an administrator. A thousand users? No problem. The corporate version is just what you need.

Does this sound like something you could make good use of? Why not try it free for 30 days and then see if you can live without it anymore. If you find you can’t, it’s an affordable business and professional tool that expands the capability of the computers you already have. Get started with your 30 day free trial of GoToMyPC right now.

Cloud Computing and WAN Bandwidth

Cloud computing has become a major trend in IT services. It sometimes seems like there is a wild stampede to anything and everything in the cloud. What may get lost in the details is just how you actually get to the cloud. That mechanism is WAN bandwidth.

The WAN, or Wide Area Network, is often used to describe any connection beyond the boundary of the business office or corporate campus. Locations in town may be served by a MAN, or Metropolitan Area Network, that is limited to a small geographical area. Beyond that, you need WAN bandwidth to reach other locations or networks.

So, why is WAN bandwidth so important? It all has to do with traffic levels and where that traffic goes on the network. When data centers were all local, network traffic primarily stayed on the LAN. Once remote data centers were implemented for backup and disaster recovery, MAN or WAN bandwidth increased to accommodate the extra resource needs. Now that the server racks and disks have been replaced by cloud services, the lion’s share of network traffic goes to and from the cloud.

Where is the cloud? One of the most popular depictions of the cloud is the Internet. You don’t need to be formally involved with cloud computing to be using the Internet. Most everyone does. The reason that the cloud symbol is used for the Internet is that, as users, we don’t have to be concerned with the details of what all is on the Internet nor how it all interconnects. All we need to know is that we connect using a broadband Internet access service and use certain resources available through the Internet.

Now the term “cloud” is used to describe other services that may or may not have anything to do with the Internet. In may cases, it’s only the network that changes. The idea of having servers running applications and using storage owned by a service provider at some distant location isn’t unique to the Internet. What’s different about today’s cloud is that your connection is likely a private point to point data line that is used only to connect your business to the cloud services you require. With the Internet, many, many services and many, many users all share the same network.

This is where WAN bandwidth comes in. If you happen to be using cloud services on the Internet, you’ll be wanting a dedicated broadband Internet connection with enough bandwidth to ensure that your link is never congested. For non-Intenet services, you’ll want private line services with similarly adequate bandwidth. In some cases, latency and class of service are also critically important to your needs. That’s especially true for high performance applications such as financial trading or real time services such as enterprise VoIP, content delivery or telepresence.

Some clouds are private clouds in that they are owned by a particular organization for its own needs. The idea of having your own cloud is a way to share computing, applications, and storage among multiple company locations. The need for adequate WAN bandwidth still applies. You need to ensure that the traffic displaced from the LAN to the WAN still has a large enough pipe to flow through unobstructed.

Are you involved with private or public cloud computing as a user or supplier? You may have more bandwidth options that you realize. Find out by checking prices and availability of WAN bandwidth services for your business locations.



Note: Cloud networking diagram courtesy of Guivaloz on Wikimedia Commons.