Comments on: Gifted Amateurs lead the way with Cloud Computing http://punchaboveyourweight.wordpress.com/2008/08/17/gifted-amateurs-lead-the-way-with-cloud-computing/ helping small businesses to maximise value from new technologies Thu, 09 Apr 2009 13:13:48 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 By: st cloud times http://punchaboveyourweight.wordpress.com/2008/08/17/gifted-amateurs-lead-the-way-with-cloud-computing/#comment-61 st cloud times Sun, 14 Sep 2008 09:41:04 +0000 http://punchaboveyourweight.wordpress.com/2008/08/17/gifted-amateurs-lead-the-way-with-cloud-computing/#comment-61 [...] Waters chime with the experiences of ???Gifted Amateurs?? These entrepreneurs are growing their bhttp://punchaboveyourweight.wordpress.com/2008/08/17/gifted-amateurs-lead-the-way-with-cloud-computi...sctimes.com St. Cloud Times St. Cloud news, community ...St. cloud MN News - sctimes.com is the home [...] [...] Waters chime with the experiences of ???Gifted Amateurs?? These entrepreneurs are growing their bhttp://punchaboveyourweight.wordpress.com/2008/08/17/gifted-amateurs-lead-the-way-with-cloud-computi…sctimes.com St. Cloud Times St. Cloud news, community …St. cloud MN News – sctimes.com is the home [...]

]]> By: alan p http://punchaboveyourweight.wordpress.com/2008/08/17/gifted-amateurs-lead-the-way-with-cloud-computing/#comment-58 alan p Mon, 18 Aug 2008 06:40:17 +0000 http://punchaboveyourweight.wordpress.com/2008/08/17/gifted-amateurs-lead-the-way-with-cloud-computing/#comment-58 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. 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.

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