Cloud is a strange word to describe a whole host of technologies that have only one thing in common, they are hosted on the internet, rather than locally.
For the small businesses I serve, there are two areas worth their weight in gold:
- Hosted scheduling/email
- Hosted file storage and sharing
Think of the role an Exchange server plays in a larger company. You have a central place to manage email for all your employees, plus collaborate on schedules and tasks. For a number of years there have been companies hosting exchange servers in the cloud, so you don’t have to have a local one. These solutions are much more cost effective for all but the largest organizations, as Exchange servers are great when they work, and a nightmare to deal with if they are not properly managed by experts and experience a failure. These services run from about $6 per mailbox per month on the low-end, with offshore support and long hold times, to around $12.50 per month for very well managed, secure email with responsive, domestic support.
More recently, Google Apps Premier has come along at the bargain basement price of $50 per user per year. Offering similar capabilities, with the addition of up to 25GB per user, built-in sharing of Google Apps documents, and 1GB of general storage space per user, it’s a great value, and backed by a huge company. We use it internally, and have deployed it for a number of our customers.
However, if you want to share any kind of files, with server like control of who gets to see what, and whether they can change it or just view/download it, then you need a different kind of service. There are lots of players in this space, each with a different set of capabilities, but here are three to watch:
- Dropbox.com, this is designed primarily for personal file storage and sharing, you can use it to share with others, but it lacks sophistication in the area of setting up groups of people with different rights and privileges. A one person business can use it, but even most small businesses are going to find it limiting.
- Box.net, this is the 800lb gorilla of this type of service. It’s full featured, sophisticated, hooks into other services like salesforce.com, and offers an API to allow developers to build custom apps that integrate with it. It’s also a little more expensive, when compared to other players in the space. As an IT vendor, I also have some reservations about Box.net’s requirement that it contract directly with all my customers, if I decide it’s the best solution for them.
- Egnyte.com, we are strongly considering a reseller agreement with this company. Here’s why, it offers file storage, sharing, flexible group permissions, is reasonably priced, and also includes a huge amount of storage for remote backups. Like Box.net, it may be a little more complex than many small business people would wish, if they were planning to manage it themselves. We plan to integrate it with our other services, as a low-cost and flexible alternative to installing an in-house file server.
CAVEAT
What none of these services do is offer the ability to run client server applications. So you can’t move your QuickBooks or ACT databases onto them, and expect to be able to use the applications. Such applications move so much data between the PCs and the server that most internet connections will lock solid rather than run them. There’s another way to put such applications into the Cloud using server and workstation virtualization, but that’s a topic for another post.