Gifted Amateurs lead the way with Cloud Computing
Posted by: Lisa on: August 17, 2008
Recent articles in Business Week (‘How Cloud Computing is Changing the World’ by Rachael King), and the Financial Times (‘Back to Bust?’ by Richard Waters) chime with the experiences of the ‘Gifted Amateurs’ attending our Punch Above Your Weight workshops. These entrepreneurs are growing their businesses with limited time, expertise and available budget by drawing upon new web-based technologies such as the Google Docs, blogs and emerging social networks. They are circumventing the need for increasingly complex IT systems as their businesses grow by continuing to rely upon cost-effective Web 2.0 tools and their own networking skills.
Business Week notes how tapping into web-based applications represents a significant change in the way that businesses obtain software and computing power. It draws upon the example of a $11 billion electronics manufacturing company called Sanmina-SCI which is using Google Apps for email, document sharing and diary planning. Merrill Lynch suggests that such ‘cloud computing’ will expand into a global market of $95 billion over the next 5 years.
The Financial Times describes the example of 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment which has saved over $200,000 by switching its email system from Microsoft Exchange to Google’s Gmail. In a worsening economic climate, cost savings like these are not to be sneezed at for those companies prepared to take a chance with Cloud Computing. The risks, of course, concern the reliability and security of cloud-based systems. As Broadstuff shows there have been a number of high profile ‘out-ages’ already this year by providers such as Amazon S3, Google Docs, MobileMe and Twitter.
The above examples show that proactive companies are dipping their toes cautiously into the Cloud – using it mainly for non-essential applications at the moment, but with a view to extending their commitments if their experience is positive. For the new business ventures of our Gifted Amateurs, the trade off between the cost savings of Cloud Computing and the occasional reliability glitch is definitely worth it.
2 Responses to "Gifted Amateurs lead the way with Cloud Computing"
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August 18, 2008 at 7:40 am
Lisa – good article, thanks for the link. Your note tallies with our experience both as a small company using the technology and as a consultancy – the stuff stays up most of the time, so what you need to do is plan for the occasional downtime, and thus structure in some redundancy. In other words, use it but be sure to have alternatives and data back ups, especially of critical data.
If I could further refine our emerging experience it is something like this:
- design in redundancy – we use fixed line and 3G access to the ‘net for example, and although fixed line is used 90%+ of the time, its useful to have the backup.
- for the more critical applications (like hosting), pay for them – most are not onerously priced, and the risk of the freebies is that the provider is more concerned about pleasing its funders / advertisers than customers.
- always keep a copy of all data on your own systems (and a backup in a 3rd place for critical data), so you can carry on working when the cloud is down.
- similarly, its a good idea to keep local instances of any application – or a similar application – as well as cloud based applications. So for example use Google Docs by all means, but be sure to at least have something like Open Office on your machine.
It’d be interesting to do some sort of survey of what everyone uses, and how they rate its usefulness and ease of use. Skype is probably our heaviest used webservice.