In our “What the Tech” series, Jay Norris explains high-tech lingo in simple terms. Today Jay describes the building block of a lot of IT discussions, the “server.”
If you prefer reading over video, skip on down to check out the written summary.
Let me tell you a story. A very high level organization in the global economy recently came under completely new management. The new management inherited some sorry, dilapidated information technology infrastructure. They hired a new Chief Information Officer to set things straight. In his first week on the job, the new CIO worked 80+ hour weeks and the email servers were down 23% of the time. Over 82% of the computers in the company had reached their end-of-life and most of the desktops still used floppy discs.
Welcome to The White House, three years ago.
If you’re in the position to make information technology decisions regarding your office’s infrastructure, you’ve probably asked yourself this question. As your company grows, so do the needs and expectations on the technology you oversee. Getting behind on technology can cost time, efficiency, and money.
Here are five circumstances when you should consider moving that locally-hosted application server to the cloud:
Not your typical IT guy
Meet Chad Quesenberry, Director of Client Services for Claris Networks. Before he joined Claris, Chad developed the support structure for multiple billion-dollar enterprises from the ground up. So he knows his stuff. But he’s not your typical IT guy.
Chad is what you call a “Hi-Tech Redneck.” Or at least that’s what his friends have called him ever since college. “Growing up on my grandparent’s farms in Indian Valley, Virginia and Jonesboro, TN and always having a knack for technology probably has something to do with it,” he says. Or maybe it’s that he’s rigged up his barn with off-grid solar electricity, a full bathroom supplied by a rainwater collection system, and watches movies by the campfire, streamed via Mi-Fi wireless hotspots projected on the side of his barn.
It might surprise you to learn that the “IT Provider Next Door” in Knoxville, Tennessee, Claris Networks, has one of the fastest clouds on the planet. A third-party development team
called Cloud Sleuth has created an objective application to examine and report the response times of cloud infrastructures around the world. At the time of this writing, Claris Networks supports the tenth fasted cloud
on the planet.
The competition is steep, and Claris is holding its own against the big boys as well. The Windows Azure, Rackspace and Google Apps Engine clouds are in the top ten alongside your Knoxville-based cloud provider.