Guest Post - The Cloud Computing Revolution – Are You on Board?

from SmartComplianceInc.com

This guest post was written by Matt Saunders. Matt writes for Qubok, a blog which offers help to small companies on how they can grow their businesses and increase productivity by using various technologies.

Rewind the clock back 10 years and, comparatively; the internet was a particularly lonely place where home computers served little social purpose. As time progressed however, and as technologies began to emerge which connected on levels seen only in science fiction movies, we started to realise the power that connectivity had.

For some time now we have looked to the internet as a source of information, for both business and personal usage, and with the creation of social networking platforms like Facebook it has very much become a place to hang out.

But the business world is slowly adopting internet technologies on a more fundamental scale, most notably in the world of cloud computing. Because we move around a lot and we have the opportunity to be connected almost all of the time, the premise behind cloud computing is “why not put everything online?”

Theoretically speaking, documents and applications will exist entirely on a server cluster (known as the “cloud”) and very little will be housed on individual computers. When deployed practically, this makes perfect sense. Enabling small to large organisations to manage their work, giving each employee remote access, will cut down on issues such as file transfer times and out of date software because updates will be supplied automatically, and holistically, throughout the network.

Currently, individuals and very small businesses stand to benefit only a little from this way of working. The companies that will benefit significantly however, are the corporations with many locations and employees either on a national or international scale. Due to the minor learning curve and the cost of implementing a cloud system, many larger companies will be reluctant to change their infrastructure, but when they eventually do they will see a noticeable improvement in productivity.

I stated previously that individuals and small businesses will only see a marginal benefit. This is not entirely true; cloud computing carries some serious advantages to the small business. Most notably, if using a cloud hosting company, any files stored remotely will be backed up regularly so never again will information be deleted by accident without the ability to be restored easily. This alone makes cloud computing a viable and beneficial way of working, and I for one cannot wait until we see it in widespread usage across the globe!