In an article at
CRN, Andrew Hickey shows the results of a 1,000-business survey about their cloud computing plans. According to the MarketBridge survey, 70-85% of SMBs expect to move major applications to the cloud in the next year. Hickey’s article shows
why so many small to medium sized businesses are jumping on the cloud (and here’s a hint…it’s not about the money):
1. Company Growth
a. If an organization grows, it must invest more in IT resources, and cloud computing is a very pleasing alternative to a “DIY” network. Companies growing at 10% or more per year most rapidly adopt the cloud to help meet their tech needs.
Jay Witherspoon, Director of Advertising for Cellular Sales, shows some of what we can expect from the new LTE/4G phones. This is some pretty exciting stuff.
The LTE (Long-Term Evolution) Future
Verizon made a major announcement around Thanksgiving (way back in 2010) about its LTE network. Forty major markets serving 110 million Americans are slated to go online in the coming year. The entire country will be covered by 2013. And the change in network speed is going to be dramatic. Precise speed will fluctuate, but LTE provides 7-12Mbps, which is quite a bit faster than my home cable connection.
Here are a few of the cool features we're likely to see as LTE technology begins to permeate our lives...
Imagine your company represented King Arthur’s court, with jesters, advisors, ladies in waiting, the whole bit. King Arthur is your company’s CEO and CFO because he’s in control, all the money is his and he takes very good care of it. The knights at the round table are your board of directors, or executive team. They’re the ones who give advice and say, “Yes, your Highness. We can slay the fiends. Here’s how.” And then there’s Merlin, the wizard. Can you guess who that is? Merlin is the IT guy. He’s the one who does the magic in the darkest parts of your castle.
What’s your largest expense associated with buying a new computer or new hardware? There’s a good chance that it’s the hourly computer support you pay for to have everything migrated and reloaded.
Even if you’re not paying someone hourly to do this, the investment of your time that goes into the reloading process can bring major headaches. Jim Metzler and Steve Taylor of Network World submit that
the strongest case for cloud computing is that, in the cloud computing model, you get this time back.
If your primary applications are supported through the cloud, you don’t waste time and money upgrading to a new computer or after experiencing a crash. Instead, your cloud-hosted applications do what you may once have called in a computer support worker to do.
I recently had a conversation with a friend about cloud computing, and he said he didn’t like it because it was just like leasing. He saw it as fiscally irresponsible not to own something that you would invest so much money in. Why pour money into something I’m never going to own?
What my friend failed to see was the huge financial risk he brought on himself by owning his own hardware.
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