There has been plenty of buzz about “The Cloud” over the past few years. The hype seems to have peaked recently with companies buying TV ads to highlight the benefits to consumers. For a price you can now access all of your personal content like music, documents and photos remotely. In addition, you can sync up your information between mobile devices and home based-based networks through intermediary technologies known as “The Cloud.”

But what does that mean for your company?

First, it is helpful to understand what The Cloud actually is. We define cloud-based computing as technologies that deliver computing over a network as an on-demand service. The model allows for sharing of applications, resources and data with computers and mobile devices almost like a utility.

There are both public clouds and private clouds. Public clouds are accessible in a broad public domain to individual users or multiple organizations. Private clouds are resources shared by one organization. Clouds have a few distinguishing characteristics; resource pooling, self-service, rapid scalability, measured service and in the case of a public cloud broad network access.

For small and medium businesses the reality is that cloud-based computing is a great opportunity to optimize your IT infrastructure and spending to allow for a renewed focus on revenue-generating opportunities. If implemented correctly private clouds can be used to deliver IT resources to your end users quicker with more reliably and at a lower cost. From both a business and technology management perspective these technologies can provide the following benefits:
-Business Continuity
-Disaster Recovery
-Improved Security
-Increased Scalability
-Rapid Deployment
-Reduced Operations Costs
-Simplified IT Infrastructure

Many vendors are only able to offer the individual components associated with cloud computing. However, our partnership with VCE allows us to address a client’s needs with a converged infrastructure solution that delivers a complete private cloud along with pervasive virtualization.

VCE brings together technologies from industry leaders Cisco, EMC and VMWare to make deployment quick and easy for your IT team. Their Vblock Infrastructure Platforms come pre-configured with computing, networking, storage, management and virtualization components built into scalable solution.

Let us know when you’re ready to talk about how The Cloud can help your business. We can also provide you with an assessment to determine which offering makes the most sense for your organization.