13 Terrific Cloud Services for Small Business
For small businesses, cloud computing hits a particular sweet spot. With cloud services, small businesses reap the benefits of not having to deploy physical infrastructure like file and e-mail servers, storage systems or shrink-wrapped software. Plus, the "anywhere, anytime" availability of these solutions, means hassle-free collaboration between business partners and employees by simply using a browser. In fact, it's not a stretch to say that aside from a locally installed desktop operating system and browser, a lot of today's small business technology needs can be fulfilled almost completely with cloud-based offerings.
What Is Cloud Computing, Exactly?
Let's take a quick look at what constitutes a true cloud-computing solution. Cloud-computing services require no software to purchase and install. This doesn't include a Java plug-in or some other kind of lightweight applet required to use the service.
Cloud-computing fees for businesses are typically subscription-based. The vendors usually charge you on a month-to-month or annual basis. The solutions we feature here are relatively affordable and follow the subscription model. Next >
Amazon’s and Google’s Cloud Services Compared
Rumormongers say the music will be stored “in the cloud” — tech jargon for “on Apple’s servers” – although the CultOfMac blog claims inside knowledge that Jobs will instead sell customers a personal storage drive that holds the music and does the streaming from home.
Whatever Apple announces, it follows recent offerings from Google and Amazon that offer cloud-based personal music streaming for Android phone users. Both work similarly: You sign up, then download an application to your Mac or PC that uploads your music collection to Google or Amazon’s servers, and keeps it in sync. To play your music on your phone, you install an Android app that’s a music player that connects to your cloud-stored collection to stream it to your phone.
Google Music is the more impressive of the two: It will automatically upload your personal iTunes collection, including any playlists you’ve created, and keep it in sync. It offers free storage for 20,000 songs, about twenty times Amazon’s free capacity. It stores your recently-played songs on your phone, so you don’t have to stream them again. You can also tell it which tracks from your collection to keep permanently cached on your phone. Next >
A Googler Explains Why Microsoft's Cloud Services Crashed Today
During the outage, Microsoft explained via Twitter that the next version of its cloud services for business, Office 365, has been rebuilt from the ground up to be more reliable.
Why did Microsoft have to do this?
Google Apps leader Rajen Sheth has a theory.
Basically, Microsoft has been TALKING about cloud services for the last several years, but a lot of its biggest customers have probably been using hosted servers instead. When it comes to true cloud computing, Microsoft is still getting its footing.
There's a subtle difference here that's important to understand. Microsoft kicked off BPOS in 2007 as a dedicated service. Basically, each customer got Exchange (and other software) running on its own server hardware. Customers would save money by outsourcing IT costs to Microsoft, but the technology was no different than running Exchange on site.
Sheth explains that Gmail and Google Apps were designed and launched more than five years ago as a multitenant solution. That means that that the service itself and underlying data is automatically distributed among thousands of physical machines. Next >
Microsoft: Cloud computing won't hurt us
Microsoft cloud stumbles: Windows Azure turns 1 in 'anemic' market
"If you look at our history, it's always been about taking an inflection point and being the democratizing force behind," said Satya Nadella, who replaced longtime Microsoft executive Bob Muglia as the Server & Tools chief in February this year.
"At a philosophical level, if you say there is a fundamental change in architecture, we have to embrace it and ride it," Nadella continued, during a 20-minute on-stage discussion Wednesday with Eric Savitz of Forbes at the GigaOM Structure Conference.
Microsoft has always been about "low price and high volume," Nadella also said, making the case that the consumption-based economics of cloud computing fits into Microsoft's sweet spot.
"We're not the ones with high license fees," he said. "I look at this as structurally a very beneficial thing for us. But, sure, we have to innovate."
Windows Azure, Microsoft's platform-as-a-service cloud, opened for business more than a year ago but hasn't gained the adoption seen by Amazon's infrastructure-as-a-service offering or Salesforce's PaaS cloud. Read more
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
