Top Enterprise Cloud Solutions

To cloud or not to cloud? That is the question for most businesses, including mid-level and large enterprise organizations. Let’s take a look at the most popular cloud solutions and what they can do for your company.

When we think of cloud computing, the first thing that comes to mind is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Would you be surprised to know that Amazon launched this suite of services nearly a decade ago? Amazon was early in recognizing that it had developed enormous data center resources to power its own ecommerce applications, and that it could generate additional revenue by renting out underutilized resources to other companies. It’s an attractive proposition to companies that haven’t made a similar investment and cringe at the thought of the amount of capital investment involved.

The two most popular AWS services are Amazon EC2 and S3. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offers scalable virtualized private servers. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) complements the servers with online storage. These services typify what is known in the cloud industry as IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service. This infrastructure represents the physical servers, disk drives, operating system software, interconnections, power and environmental controls that you would normally install in your own data center facility. Instead of buying, operating and maintaining all of this hardware, you rent it from Amazon or another cloud service provider.

A major difference between cloud solutions and other ways of getting the job done is that the cloud is sold on a pay-as-you-go basis. There is no up-front capital commitment nor a standard monthly rental fee for a particular set of hardware. That differentiates moving to the cloud from simply packing up your equipment and moving it to a colocation center or renting the necessary assets from the colocation provider. The cloud isn’t about physical resources, it’s about virtualization. Mind you, the cloud service provider does, indeed, have massive physical resources in the form of racks and racks of servers and disk drives as far as the eye can see. What they do is divvy up these resources using virtualization software so that you seem to have one or more servers to yourself and all the storage you need.

Virtualization is what makes the cloud so nimble. Instead of having to make a month by month commitment to a physical server, you can deploy virtual servers as fast as you can set them up using a browser-based control panel. If business slumps or you are simply moving into a lower demand time of the year, you can release some of those servers and watch your charges go down. You pay for each server by the hour or number of CPU cycles used. Likewise, you buy storage by the MB or GB without concern for what drive is going to hold your data.

Like infrastructure, software can also be rented using the cloud model. In this case, the service provider has their own private cloud and has virtualized the software packages to support as many or few users as you have available. A very popular SaaS application is Salesforce.com for Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Other SaaS business applications include accounting, collaboration, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and human resource management (HRM) services in the cloud.

Another function that has been virtualized and moved to the cloud is the PBX telephone system. Instead of investing in an in-house telephone switching system and the trunk lines that connect it to the telephone company, you can pay by the seat for a hosted PBX. This is also known as hosted VoIP, since VoIP technology easily lends itself to a cloud solution. All you keep in-house are SIP telephones that connect to your converged voice and data network. Some hosted VoIP providers can integrate your smartphones into the same virtual PBX as your desk phones to create a completely converged solution.

Are you considering a move to the cloud as a potentially more flexible and less costly approach to your IT and business telephony needs? Get competitive quotes for enterprise cloud solutions to compare with your current business model in order to make an informed decision. Quotations and expert consultation are available without charge for serious business users.

Cloud Hosting With a Free Trial

You’ve been keeping an eye on the cloud computing phenomena for a long time. You’re thinking that it might be something that could benefit your business. Still, you're reluctant to put forth the cost, effort and commitment to give it a try. Now there’s an opportunity that might be just what you need. It’s a free trial of cloud hosting to get you started.

One easy way to get your toe into cloud services is to start with cloud hosting. Why cloud hosting? It’s a logical upgrade for a operation that has outgrown shared hosting solutions and is looking at VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and dedicated servers. The beauty of the cloud is that it offers you a flexibility and cost advantage over competing ways to host your web sites.

VPS and dedicated web servers are popular because you don’t need to make capital purchases and provide support and connectivity they way you do with running your own data center. They are one step up from the intermediate solution of colocation hosting, where you move your equipment to a public data center. The limitation of VPS and dedicated servers is that you pay a monthly fee for a bundle of resources. If you find that you have over or underestimated your requirements, you can generally upgrade or downgrade over the course of days, weeks or months.

Getting the resources right is a tricky proposition. If you order too little in the way of disk space, processing or bandwidth, you can find yourself watching hopelessly as a huge surge of viral traffic gets stopped cold by your overloaded website. The potential loss of sales can be far in excess of your monthly hosting fees. So what do you do? Take your chances or over-provision? Having all the resources you need will protect against traffic surges, but the rest of the time you are just paying to watch the disks spin.

Worse, yet, is having the type of site with wide variations in traffic and sales. You may find that your needs follow a seasonal, weekly or even daily pattern. Or perhaps no pattern at all. That’s especially true if you are a startup with the next killer app, but you don’t really know when it is going to take off or to what extent.

These are the kind of problems that cloud hosting is designed for. The cloud is a virtual environment with massive resources hidden just out of sight. If you need another server, you don’t wait for a technician to come around with a screwdriver and mount another one in your rack. You simply go to your control panel and deploy one or more in a matter of seconds. Things getting too quiet? Cancel your excess capacity and you won’t be paying for it anymore.

Atlantic.net has been providing hosting solutions since 1994 and operates a SAS 70 Type II platform that can handle large as well as modest requirements. They are making a splash in the cloud services field by setting up a system that makes it easy for just about anyone to get into cloud hosting quickly and easily.

You have your choice of Windows or Linux servers that can be deployed in less than a minute. Scale up or down in seconds, not next month. Flexible hourly billing starts at just 1.5 cents per hour and you pay only for what you use. There’s an API to control cloud servers programmability and you can add cPanel and WHM control panels to any cloud server for easy and familiar administration.

What’s your commitment level? There are no commitments, contracts or setup fees. You can cancel your servers at any time. Your data is backed-up nightly and the self-healing redundant infrastructure with automatic failover ensures availability. In fact, this cloud service comes with a 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Does this sound like the kind of hosting that would work well for your company? Well, don’t go sign any contracts or make any commitments elsewhere until you give cloud hosting a try for free. You’ll wonder why you didn’t head to the cloud sooner.