Are You Cloud Ready?

Cloud computing has been around for awhile but it is increasingly being used for more and more purposes. If you have used an email system such as AOL, GMail or Hotmail you have been technically using the cloud.  Websites are also all mostly hosted on remote servers and while outages happen they are usually infrequent.

Cloud storage has also been gaining in popularity, but has been slow to catch on due to privacy risks.  Configuring cloud storage for secure access can be confusing and difficult and very few standards exist.  Amazon’s recent crash has shown that even with massive redundancy you still need to plan for downtime and have a localized backup copy easily available. Ultimately more and more data will be moved out to cloud storage.

The most common use of cloud storage is for offsite backups, but even this is proving challenging due to upload/download speeds and usage caps by the ISPs.  2nd Opinion can help you configure a solution that maintains privacy while providing secure access to critical data.

Applications have slowly been migrating out to the cloud, Microsoft and Google both provide a full suite of business tools that are not installed locally but live in the cloud. Again this is great unless you don’t have reliable access to the Internet, we can help you with these decisions.

Virtual desktops and servers are the next step, which provide you the same desktop experience no matter where you are.  This technology gets better every year and decreased costs are making this a reality for even the most smallest company.  Issues still need to be resolved around the applications that companies use and if they are cloud friendly.  Access to local resources such as printers, scanners and other peripherals is still a problem with most applications not built to take into account remote access solutions.

If you are considering a Cloud based solution please contact us for a 2nd Opinion.