I’m currently starting a new company called Hello There (http://hellothere.se/) and what I’ve done the latest time is to evaluate and setup the infrastructure for our company. I’ve compare working in the “old” way or trying something new as the “cloud” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing).
I really love the whole idea about the cloud. The basic idea is that you host all your content online and as well use online tools for your workflow. One of the best things as well is that your don’t need to know what’s going on with the technical infrastructure.
I started to compare and look for services that could fill my company need and when we work as a “agency” it’s a lot of big files (videos,images,binary development). Search and went thru a big list of services until I found a couple that looked interesting for evaluation.
Some of the goals that they needed to fulfill is:
1.) Hosting uptime > 95% (ideal is 99%)
2.) Security (SSL, hopefully extra encryption)
3.) Easy to learn
4.) Easy to use
Points 1 & 2 are important for the company and to maintain our security policy for the clients. Points 3 & 4 are important for the employees where there is a wide range of age (25-50) and where everyone has worked the “old” way for many years.
Now we have our services running and I will probably reveal them over time when we have worked in a couple of projects and really tried them but here is the experiences so far. I will then as well describe how we work and what hardware we are using and why. Everything tries to go mobile as much as possible, always connected, always updated.
Costs:
When comparing running Microsoft Exchange Servers, having own backups servers with technical support, buying desktop applications the “cloud” solution is much cheaper. I’ve slices the cost with 80%/employee if I compare from my previous company.
Security:
Uptime guarantees is not always there and that could create some real problems in tight project delivery situations. The security varies between the different services but most uses SSL, very few gives VPS for data storage. Some services doesn’t have enterprise solutions with admin accounts and that could really create problems with user logins and sharing/grouping data.
General:
All services has their own standard for handling accounts and passwords and there are few services that actually talks to each other. The majority of the services feels like “beta”. The whole “could” community works perfect for a single user or a small group that are very online aware, but for companies it’s not quite there yet. The support varies here as well depending on time-zone and what your pay for your account. A good thing about many services is that it’s easy to upgrade/downgrade the account with users or features.
Future:
For this to take of and become the new standard there are a couple of things that I would like to see.
1.) Standard login
Why not e.g. continue on “Open ID” (http://openid.net/) and make it for enterprise solutions like a online LDAP where you control your accounts for all online services. Today you need to control it for each services alone and with the different standards this is a real pain in the ass.
2.) Security
The security for handling data with SSL, VPS e.g. company information has much higher demands than personal users or small independent companies. To often backup the data is important as well, some services has every 10 minutes and some 1/day.
3.) Uptime
The uptime is critical, having the services go down during work would create a direct impact that none of your files are available.
4.) Sharing
Create more open API;s and implement others API;s to their own services so that content and info can be shared as much as possible. For e.g. many services has own calendars when everyone already has a calendar elsewhere, instead the end user needs to control all linking, update at the correct place.
Conclusion:
When comparing the costs with what you get, comparing the workflow and access to correct files, access from anywhere e.g. the “cloud” wins in my book. I have no expertise in this subject but I had no problem setting up the services and create a complete infrastructure for my company. What I love about it is that you pay often monthly fee so you have control over the expenses and you will get the new features as they are being developed so no expensive license costs.
The “cloud” is still in “beta” mode and I figure it will take a year or two before it starts to get more structured and easier for the end-users to use multiple services. The perfect scenario is a common “portal” where you administrate your company employees and services, and from there choose what services you want to use that fits your company workflow and needs. The “portal” hosts the actual data so you could change the services and go for something else, maybe in another life =)
The Winner: CLOUD
Life
cloud, infrastructure, office, online services, work tool
