Have you been thinking about the cloud?

If not, perhaps you should be.

The cloud promises to harness the Internet to improve the efficiency, cost, scalability and availability of the IT services of almost every organization, regardless of size. The cloud can make a huge difference in your own IT operation - saving expenses, freeing up resources, dramatically improving turnaround time and delivering a more sophisticated experience to your users, customers and potential customers.

What Is The Cloud?

"Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and
information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid.

Cloud computing is a paradigm shift following the shift from mainframe to client-server in the
early 1980s. Details are abstracted from the users, who no longer have need for expertise in,
or control over, the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them."

Source: Wikipedia, citing "Distinguishing Cloud Computing from Utility Computing," Krissi Danielson - March 26, 2008

According to the Internap White Paper, the many benefits of the cloud to IT organizations include:

• Reduces capital expenditures
• On‐demand scalability/provisioning and pricing model. You only pay for what you need.
• Eliminates IT department infrastructure overhead
• Allows rapid implementation timelines that can align with strategic and tactical initiatives
• Custom Web software is much simpler and less expensive to create and implement.
• No deployment of software

Essentially, cloud computing is an architecure in which you take advantage of remote servers and security to power all or part of your software and database implementations.

There are several flavors of cloud:

IaaS: Infrastructure as a service. This is a service in which your data is hosted remotely, available over the Web to field representatives, satellite offices or customers, at your discretion. Physical locations and connections become meaningless. Any browser is your network access tool.

The infrastructure host takes responsibility for managing and maintaining both the hardware and core software (such as a database engine) that support your data storage and retrieval, provide instant scalability, backup and security.

In the IaaS model, you are responsible for the software that accesses your remote data.

PaaS: Platform as a service. Some cloud hosts offer frameworks, such as Saleforce.com, with its back-end dashboards, reporting tools, mass e-mail and a host of other software support and features that provide an entire platform for remote cloud software development.

SaaS: Software as a service. Microsoft Live is a perfect example of SaaS. Your users run browser-based versions of Microsoft's productivity tools and their data is stored remotely on Microsoft's servers. You save the cost of expensive licenses and time-consuming distributions and updates. Web-based software runs the newest version just by accessing the URL for the software in the browser.

The cloud can also be private or hosted. You can build your own cloud, hosted at your ISP or your own IT facility and make your data and applications available to your local employees and management, remote offices and customers.

Of course, hosted clouds provide the greatest savings and reliability. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce (some of the major cloud hosts) have huge IT organizations and server farms and are highly experienced at handling almost overwhelming loads without failure or downtime. Yet they can provide those same services to your organization at very low rates because of their huge economies of scale.

Sio2 And The Cloud

Sio2 is fortunate to count, among its staff, a variety of highly-experienced cloud engineers and designers whose expertise covers a wide range of cloud-related disciplines from infrastructure to remote database management to cloud software development in .Net, PHP and SOAP, plus end-user and IT training and support.

We can help you plan your move to the cloud. You can start simply with pilot programs that move your less-mission-critical applications to the cloud, then move more of your important applications to the cloud as your confidence in this platform, its performance and security grows with success.

Click here for some examples of cloud projects developed by SiO2 staff.