What is it?

Essentially a cloud service is one delivered from the Internet. You are used to having software installed on your local PC. You purchase it and we install and maintain it. If the makers of this software decided to make it available in the cloud you wouldn’t buy or own a copy.

You would pay a monthly fee to be able to use the software from a website using your Internet browser. Nothing would be installed on your computer. You would automatically receive upgrades to the software.

Now imagine that idea incorporated into every aspect of your computer system—your backups could be made to a cloud facility on the Internet; your email server could be hosted outside of your organisation; even your server could be moved to the cloud. That is what all the buzz is about right now.

How does that make things better for me?

In a nutshell cloud computing:

• brings simplicity to your computer system which reduces the cost of support and maintenance
• means you no longer have to make significant capital investment to implement something new
• lets you to try new technology without committing to it
• allows you to adapt quickly thereby bringing agility to your business
• keeps your system current and you ahead of the competition

As with all technology, the complete answer is complicated and there are some important questions that are the subject of much debate. What happens if your Internet connection is not fast enough or is unreliable? Where is your data stored and who has access to it? How is your data backed up? How would you continue to operate if the cloud provider went out of business.

At the same time very significant players in the industry are completely committed to moving everything they do into the cloud. Huge amounts of time and money is being invested in new products and new ways of doing things. So there is an inevitability about our progress in that direction that needs to be embraced.

At Evolve we offer a range of services based on products delivered form the cloud – Offsite Backup, Office 365, Server Hosting, Anti-virus Scanning, Disaster Recovery. In fact, many of the tools we use for managing our business are based in the cloud.

Our vision for small businesses remains a bit of both:

– A small, simple and cheap server in the office will provide centralised management of the network, data and printing to local users

– Email should be hosted in the cloud.

– Security will be provided both locally by traditional security software and devices; and from the cloud with products such as anti-virus, email and web filtering.

Where do I find out more?

If you want to know more  about how the Cloud might be relevant to your business then call on 020 8939 8481.