Cloud Services
What’s all the Fuss About?
Not many people know it, but the term ‘cloud computing’ was coined by Corkman Sean O’ Sullivan (known by many from Dragon’s Den). It’s basically a more marketable term for distributed computing, or for hosted services and software that you can access from anywhere.
A standard definition would be “the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.” (Google)
Connecting up the dots… and everything else
Back in the early days of the Internet connections were slow and unreliable. Even up to a few years ago business users had little faith in the stability of network connections and wanted their core systems to work offline all the time. Gradually though the internet connections became faster and more robust. Now it is normal to have a computer connected 24/7. Now we expect data connections in the way that we expect electricity, as a standard utility. This means that software that you would normally run on your local computer, downloaded to your hard drive and installed manually, can now be simple reliably accessed over the Internet. The software is hosted on a distant server, somewhere in ‘the Cloud’, a term that has become synonymous with the new breed of software products.
Getting to the Key Advantages
At Goodside we can help a business cut through the marketing hype and explore cloud solutions that may indeed offer strong benefits or reduced costs. Microsoft 365 and Sharepoint, Offsite Backup, Google docs/gmail, Salesforce, Dropbox: there are a variety of trusted companies providing useful products and services.
Distributed Cloud services are an amazing technical achievement: billions of bits bouncing down copper wires and fibre optic cables to a server somewhere faroff crunching through your data and applications. Advantages of cloud-based systems include ease-of-access from any machine that can connect to the Internet, new methods for sharing files and activities, lower reliance and reduced costs related to locally managed hardware, potentially better security and definitely better backup systems.
Balancing Security with Accessibility: your cloud data is online; in the memory chips and hard drives of remote companies. While it’s hard to beat the security of a RAID desktop in a locked room with no network connections, said disconnected machine is also probably useless: as the now old quote goes, “The most usable system is insecure; the most secure system is unusable”
The companies that provide cloud services build their reputation on reliability and security: they are after all dedicated to making money from providing cloud services.
The biggest downside of the cloud approach is of course, that if you are offline, you’re out of luck. There are also different security risks: sure, nobody can get your data if they steal your laptop, but what if they get your password? What if somebody gets your Facebook password, which turns out to be the same as your Gmail password, which can be used to reset passwords on all of your other online accounts by clicking on ‘forgot your password?’ buttons?
Another potential issue is not being able to access the server itself, though this may be a good thing: servers are complex and it is easy to make things worse while trying to fix an issue.
These risks are part of the parcel,and do not ruin the huge potential of Cloud services. We have had great success with, for example, Microsoft 365 when used by a company that has offices in both Ireland and China. All of their files can be accessed easily by all offices, while access rules and permissions carefully control who can see what and who can, for example, delete anything.