Out Of The Recession, Into The Cloud

In the midst of the Great Recession, a huge business transformation has been underway. The way companies do business in the next decade will be far different from the processes they employed in the decades up till now. The new normal will be far more agile and driven by everything in the cloud.

Why the cloud? Think of the cloud as the new data center, the new machine shop, the new steam engine, the new printing press. It will be the heart of heart of many businesses and an essential process tool for others.

There are two prime needs that are driving this shift to cloud solutions. One is the desire to reduce costs, both capital expenses and operation expenses, and tie the level of expenditures more closely with the level of business. The other need is closely related. It is the need for agility to survive and prosper within any business climate.

Both of these needs have risen to prominence in this protracted downturn. Business cycles are normal. Companies are accustomed to going with the flow. You expand when things are booming and contract or at least hold your own when things slow. In a few months or a year business picks up again.

Well, that’s how it was for decades. What’s different this time is both the depth and the duration of the pull back. Companies that found themselves locked into expenses based on normal business levels are in a pickle. Some have been unable to weather the storm and have had to fold their tents. Others, in better shape, have taken notice and are making moves to prevent getting caught in an untenable situation themselves.

This is where the cloud is starting to look attractive. Cloud services that were once only available to large companies with massive processing needs have been scaled down to suit smaller and medium size businesses. The more important computers and/or the Internet are to running your business, the more useful the cloud can be. If you use PCs, tablets, smartphones, or business telephones, there are cloud solutions that are right for you.

What moves to the cloud? Servers, of course. You replace racks full of servers in the back room or a environmentally controlled data center with virtual servers that you run remotely. Those servers run your business applications, often in the form of Software as a Service (SaaS). Accounting, marketing, customer service, sales, inventory control, team collaboration, project management, billing and invoicing, ecommerce, human resources, and transaction processing are examples of what can be done in the cloud. Specialized servers power your business phones from the cloud.

Your cloud servers, storage and public facing bandwidth replace similar IT resources within your company. There difference is that you are now renting these resources rather than owning and operating them. You no longer have to make the equipment investment or perform the maintenance, upgrades and repairs. You don’t have to be concerned about data backups because these can be setup to run automatically within the cloud.

The other thing that you have with cloud solutions is the agility to scale your operations up or down at will. The physical cloud has more resources than you can ever use yourself. You can add and subtract servers and drives, often immediately with online control. You pay only for what you use while you are using it. When business slows, you back off to meet your new needs. When things pick up, you add resources as you need to and can afford to pay for from an increasing revenue stream.

Do you feel that your company would be better able to deal with uncertain business conditions if you could easily adjust technical resources and expenses? If so, you should consider taking advantage of cloud computing and communications services on a scale that makes sense for your business.

Disaster Recovery Is Now a Service

It’s one of those days that’s warm, too warm. The skies are darkening and its eerily quiet. It’s the kind of day when bad things can happen quickly. You don’t have to wait long. The skies quickly darken, the wind picks up and there is a roaring noise that grows louder by the moment. The next sound you hear is the storm sirens going off all over town. You run for cover in the basement storage area where you are protected. Up above, windows shatter and you can hear the wrenching sound of metal being ripped from the roof and sides of the building. Then the chaos dies down and it’s quiet again. You go up the stairs and open the door to see...

What you see is a landscape littered with debris to the horizon. That includes what little is left of your business. File cabinets, computers, server racks, desks and what used to be office walls are strewn in all directions. You spent a decade going into business and a half hour going out of business. Is it even possible to pick up the pieces and keep going?

Every year many long established businesses face this scenario or one of equal consequence. The utter destruction of sudden unexpected disaster knocks them out of business so hard that they just can’t put it back together again. Without some sort of disaster planning, all that critical business information on hard drives, CD-ROM backups, as paper files in thin metal file cabinets and cardboard storage boxes can be annihilated right before your eyes. You have no order records, you have no customers lists, you have no written procedures, you have no tax files, you have no proprietary drawings. Years, even decades of writing, drawing, entering data, making notes and carefully organizing it all vanishes. Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes of digital data representing the sum total of your business knowledge is smashed beyond retrieval. Worse, the cost and time involved in putting it all back in place are too much to bear. It’s time to pack it in.

Does any of that send a shudder up your spine? It should. Unless you’ve put bulletproof disaster recovery processes in place you are vulnerable. At this point it’s just a matter of time before the worst happens. The good fortune that’s smiled upon you up till now might not be there tomorrow... and there’s no way to know when that tomorrow will be. Doesn’t it make a lot of sense to take control now and put measures in place that can ensure the continuity of your business?

The advent of the cloud is creating some opportunities for disaster prevention and recovery that were hard to do previously. For instance, you know that you need copies of everything critical to your business stored in at least two places. Your computer hard drive and the desk drawer with the backup disks isn’t even close to adequate. Smaller companies may choose to have a safe or storage room for backup materials. Larger operations can afford a second data center across town. In the event of a massive tornado, hurricane, earthquake, flood or fire that devastates an entire city, neither business is protected. They are both wiped out because the disaster claims their primary and backup data.

The nice thing about the cloud is that you can pick a cloud that is located far away. It’s unlikely that any man made or natural disaster is going to wipe out geographically separated data centers at the same time. Certainly it makes sense to backup your electronic data to the cloud, but what if you could replicate your entire electronic operation in the cloud?

This is the service that Windstream is offering with their Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). The idea is to replicate your physical and virtual servers in the Windstream cloud. It’s not just a place to go and get new IT resources to replace what you’ve lost. This is a system that shadows your data center operations on a continuous basis. In effect you have a real business operating in-house and a virtual copy running in the cloud. They operate in parallel until something happens that puts your local operation out of commission. Then you pick-up where you left off using the cloud copy of your business. Once you get re-established locally, you sync your new data center with the cloud and your are back in business as if nothing ever happened.

Would you sleep better knowing that your business is protected by a mirror image in the cloud? If this sound like that type of service that you would find valuable, then check out cost and features of disaster recovery as a service for your particular business. It’s the continuity insurance that no paper insurance policy can provide.




Note: Photo of tornado destruction courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

How The Cloud Provides Virtualization For The SMB

Virtualization has been a hot topic within enterprise data centers for years. It’s a matter of getting more out of what you already have. Virtualization can turn a lightly loaded server into many smaller servers that you’d otherwise have to buy. It can ease the burden of a heavily loaded server across many hardware platforms, avoiding the expense of one monstrous hardware platform. That’s great for large corporations, but what about small and medium size businesses. Is there any way they can gain the efficiencies of virtualization?

There is now. Just look to the cloud. Virtualization is the magic behind the curtain that makes the cloud a practical reality. Clouds are nothing more than extremely large data centers set up to serve many tenants. The principle is that any customer will perceive having access to infinite resources and a sense of being the only user if the data center is engineered correctly. The practical way to do that is with virtualization.

Every aspect of the cloud is virtualized. It starts with the servers used as computing resources. The racks and racks full of physical servers are virtualized into hundreds or thousands of virtual servers. What happens on one virtual server stays on one virtual server. As long as there are enough physical resources to support the demand for as many virtual servers as customers activate, users have no idea how many other customers are sharing the same physical assets or what the maximum number of virtual servers can be.

The same is true for storage, also virtualized, and bandwidth, which has always worked well as a virtualized resource. Even software can be virtualized when running on the cloud. This has led to the Software as a Service or SaaS model. Customers perceive having their own installation of a software package, although in practice they are one out of many.

So, what does this have to do with the Small and Medium Business (SMB)? Once you are relieved from the burden of ownership, the barriers to entry for fairly sophisticated computing services shrink considerably. Few companies have the multi-million dollar capital resources to go out and build secure, environmentally controlled data centers with layers of redundant power, and then populate these spaces with rack after rack of the latest hardware. They also need to budget to hire the staff that makes all of these resources work together reliably and keep on top of patches, upgrades and troubleshooting.

The cloud moves all of that cost and effort from your hands to those of a dedicated service provider who is in business to manage the cloud and nothing else. They’re not trying to run a manufacturing, marketing or healthcare company. They’re in business to run a cloud and run it for excellent performance. By purchasing your IT services from a cloud provider instead of replicating a data center on-premises, the smaller a company you can be and still afford the service. It’s now possible for even “mom & pop” operations to use cloud services from the day the business opens and grow their IT right along with their business.

Here’s something else that SMB operations are finding is better off in the cloud than on-site. That’s PBX telephone systems. How many companies have the expertise to run their own phone systems? Many contract with VARs (Value Added Resellers) and consultants to buy, install and maintain an in-house telephone system. Send all that to the cloud and all you need onsite is the phones and perhaps a provider installed managed gateway. They even take care of the trunk lines that connect to the public telephone system.

What’s all this cost? Cloud services are sold on a pay-as-you-go basis. Many are prices by the month for each user or “seat,” as they are called. Computing is sold by the number of virtual servers and quantity of storage per month or even per hour. Unlike normally contracted services, cloud resources are easily increased or decreased. Often you can do this through a Web-based control panel for your account. Your bill is automatically adjusted as you add and subtract resources.

Are you finding it too hard to acquire the computing and communication resources you really need to be competitive? Consider getting those resources as services from the cloud and pay only for what you use now with option of rapidly scaling up when business conditions dictate. Compare prices and options from multiple cloud service providers now and compare with the expense of trying to do it all yourself.

The Ubiquitous Cloud of 2012

The business skies are clouding for 2012. This cloud isn’t a sign of foul weather ahead. Just the opposite. The cloud of 2012 brings relief to businesses living on a razor’s edge with little confidence in their ability to predict the future. Why try to be a forecaster when you can simply position yourself to respond as needed, depending on which way the wind blows?

Is there climate change afoot? One could easily argue that the business climate has already changed. Many businesses have found themselves stuck in the doldrums where nothing moves at all. Others experience volatility, where they are not sure which way the breezes will blow tomorrow. How many managers long for the old days, not that many years ago, when growth was robust, the path ahead was crystal clear, and there were no storms brewing on the horizon?

The best remedy for this new, new climate may not be to run away from developing clouds, but toward them. The IT cloud can be the solution you need to fend off those other clouds of doubt, worry and ill-weather. What the information technology cloud can do is let you ride with the wind and tack as needed to meet your business goals. Technically, what cloud services do is let you move from an ownership model of investing, maintaining and upgrading to a rental model of pay-as-you-go.

Ownership has its advantages. It puts you in control. Your business capital is right down the hall where you can see it. Nobody can take it away from you because it’s yours. You can do with it what you wish. There is depreciation to help the bottom line and once it is paid off, you own it without further payments... or so you think.

The problem with the ownership model for technology is that today’s servers and PBX systems aren’t like steam engines, lathes, CNC machining centers or mainframe computers. You don’t buy a monster machine for your company and expect it will still be going strong long after you retire. The half-life of anything powered by electronic chips or dependent on the vagaries of the World Wide Web is almost shorter than the time you need to get it fully productive.

Your capital investment is also the start of your costs, not the end. Even if breakdowns are infrequent, there is a steady stream of upgrades, modifications and security features to be installed and tested. That means ongoing costs for both software and personnel. None of this stuff runs perfectly for long with your back turned. There is always the need to deal with something that has dropped offline or needs a soft reset. It is nature of anything microprocessor based to get lost in its nearly incalculable software paths. It’s rare that you need to shutdown a box to stop the smoke from pouring out. It’s a given that you’ll need to unplug it and plug it back in to “magically” fix whatever is hung up.

There’s no denying the inherent nature of technology. The real question is whether it makes more sense for you to take ownership of these issues or pawn them off on someone else. A decade or two ago, the answer was clearly to do as much in-house as possible. Today? Launching those monkeys off your back and into the cloud is looking better and better.

I haven’t dropped the word “outsourcing” yet, but this is the time to embrace it. In simplest terms, you hire someone else to do things that are more cost effective for them to handle than for you to do yourself. On a macro scale, there can be major societal upheaval caused by suddenly shifting 100,000 jobs from here to there. On a micro scale, business by business, the evolution from doing everything in-house to buying services from other companies specialized in that service can increase your agility to compete in a world where the view of tomorrow is murky. Outsourcing technology to the cloud is going to be big in 2012, perhaps enveloping.

What can you transfer to the cloud? Technology tools are prime candidates. You use these tools to perform your business, they aren’t the core of your business. Does it make any difference to the nature of what you are doing whether you own that rack of servers, rent the same boxes from a colocation center or pay by the hour to use virtualized servers in the cloud? Not if they all do exactly the same function.

Technology services in the cloud now include virtual servers that can be expanded or contracted instantly, pools of disk storage, high bandwidth Internet connections, network security, development platforms, enterprise software packages, and telephone communications. That’s right, you no longer need a telephone system in your office. You still need the phones, of course, but the switching system and the outside trunk lines to the public telephone network can be provided by the cloud. That includes contact and call centers as well.

There must be a good reason for all the fervor surrounding cloud based services. Is it simply the fashionable new thing for business or are we experiencing a fundamental shift in how we will run businesses for the foreseeable future? If this is the new mode of operation to be competitive, how long do you want to wait before checking it out? It’s likely well worth your while to at least compare cloud options to what you are doing now. Then decide whether a small cloud, large cloud or no cloud at all makes the most sense for your business.

SMB Cloud Computing Portfolio

Cloud computing has come to the enterprise in a big way, but how about the small to medium size businesses? Does anyone offer a portfolio of cloud services that make sense for these companies?

Just such a collection of integrated cloud services is now available from Broadview Networks. Broadview is a communications provider serving the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic United States. They offer a wide variety of connectivity that includes the popular T1 and bonded T1 lines, Ethernet over Copper, Metro Fiber Ethernet, MPLS networking, SIP Trunking and even POTS lines.

What makes Broadview Networks particularly interesting as a cloud services provider is that they already have the connectivity you need to get to the cloud. Many cloud computing companies offer only the infrastructure, platform or software as a service. It’s up to you to figure out how you’ll reliably connect to their cloud. Broadview can give you both the services and the high reliability connections that make it all work seamlessly.

Cloud communications, also called Hosted PBX, moves the telephone switching system and its network out of your facilities and to the service provider. Your handsets connect directly to your LAN, along with your PCs, printers and other network equipment. An advantage of Hosted PBX is that you don’t need the capital investment, maintenance and dedicated staff to have an enterprise phone system for your business. That’s all handled by the service provider.

Broadview Networks offers Hosted PBX for the SMB, but also has a new portfolio of cloud computing services. These include Hosted Business E-Mail, Office Anywhere, Hosted SharePoint, Cloud Backup and Recovery, and both Virtual and Dedicated Servers. All of these help you increase productivity without the traditional capital expenditures.

Broadview’s Hosted Business E-mail is a managed email solution that gives you enterprise-grade e-mail functions that include contacts, calendaring, notes, tasks and folders. If you wish, you can expand this functionality with Hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010 to gain shared contacts, cross-user tasks, distribution lists, group calendaring, plus archival, compliance and eDiscovery options. You control everything through an administrator portal that lets you quickly and easily add or delete e-mail boxes.

Office Anywhere uses Citrix 6.0 to virtualize your desktop environment so that user applications and data reside in the cloud. This is especially valuable for mobile workers and business with multiple locations, in that documents and applications can be accessed through a simple Web browser anywhere in the world. No need to worry about individual file backups. All data is automatically backed up in the cloud and easily recovered when needed.

Broadview’s Hosted Microsoft SharePoint 2010 helps your team collaborate in a secure real-time environment. That includes road warriors, home-based employees and remotely located colleagues. The SharePoint environment lets them collaborate and create as if they are all located in the same room. Team members can view, comment and edit the same document, speeding the process of document creation, review and revision.

Do you still want to maintain your own servers or create a hybrid public and private cloud with some of your own equipment augmented by on-demand cloud services? Either way, you need a robust backup and recovery system to protect your valuable business information files. Broadview’s Cloud Data Backup and Recovery gives you the ability to backup your data to a high performance data center in the cloud. You’ll have secure off-site disaster recovery and backup with on-demand provisioning of extra storage. In addition to backing up your mission critical servers, you can also backup up employee’s workstations and laptops from anywhere in the world. No need to worry about losing a laptop and its valuable data or suffering an untimely disk failure. Your data is easily recovered from the cloud so you can continue operations.

Broadview is also a colocation hosting services provider. They offer virtualized or dedicated servers secured in SAS 70 Type II-certified data centers. You have your choice of Windows or Linux operating systems running on HP and Cisco servers.

Have you been curious about what a move to the cloud can do for your business? Regardless of size, there are cloud services scaled to meet your needs. Check out pricing and availability for SMB cloud computing services now to assist your tradeoff analysis.



Note: Background cloud photo courtesy of NASA Goddard.

Computing In The Cloud

“Cloud computing” is the term you see everywhere lately. But what is computing in the cloud all about and are there really benefits to moving out of your own data center and into the cloud?

Cloud computing originally meant accessing a pool of computers to accomplish a task that was too big for the resources you could afford to own. You may have contributed some unused computing power to the SETI@Home program to help search for ET. It’s still going, by the way, after almost 12 years of combing through the output of radio telescope signals. The genius behind this project is to link thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of idle personal computers through broadband Internet connections. Each PC has a small but significant amount of unused processing power. By divvying up a large computing task into bite (byte?) size pieces and collecting the results, all those computers can be linked to create one enormous virtual supercomputer.

The idea of calling remotely located distributed resources a “cloud” goes back to the public telephone network and later to the Internet. Engineers would draw a picture of a cumulus cloud to represent a network who’s complexity was far more than needed to be diagramed every time you wanted to use it. Somewhere out in the misty core of that cloud were all the resources required. You only needed to understand it abstractly, the way most users don’t need to understand the detailed workings of their PC to be able to use it effectively.

If we had infinite budgets, there wouldn’t be much use for cloud computing. Every company would simply buy all the computers, software, storage, data center facilities and staffing they needed. One problem is that much of the time, especially on second and third shifts, most of capacity you pay for sits idle. Even during business hours, you need enough resources to handle peak loads to maintain employee productivity and customer satisfaction. That means your average usage is well below the maximum capacity of your systems most of the day.

Few companies have infinite budgets and today’s financial environment makes it difficult to get enough capital for all the computing capacity they would like. Even the well-heeled want to hedge their bets by just using what they need as they need it, without long term commitments. The fuzzier the future looks, the more attractive pay-as-you-go looks.

That’s the impetus behind today’s rush to all things in the cloud. Yes, you can buy processing by the minute if all you need is more computing capacity. But the cloud computing definition has expanded to include all sorts of resources including web servers, online disk storage, backup and recovery storage, standard software packages, development platforms, and even PBX telephone systems. The hosted telephone services are known specifically as cloud communications services.

What’s important from a business aspect is that you rent rather than buy these services. They are available on a per minute, per seat or per feature basis. You use what you need without regard to what other customers of the service may be doing. The cloud computing provider has the responsibility to have enough capacity on-hand to meet everyone’s needs and to keep everything up to date and running smoothly.

Does the cloud computing business model sound like an attractive option for your business? If so, or if you would simply like to investigate the options, check out features and pricing for cloud computing services. One or more of these services may well be more cost effective that what you are doing now.