There are several providers offering low cost video conference and telepresence options.  VU and UMI are two that I’ve looked into briefly.  The Cisco UMI commercial I saw recently helped solidify how regular people will use video in everyday life.  The commercial shows a woman trying to teach a younger lady how to “play spoons.”  It is not a large boardroom of angry men trying to take over the world or even geeky computer folks discussing how to beat the latest online video game.  These two women, likely friends or maybe even mother and daughter, can sit down and talk as well as see each other, in high definition – HD.  So there really are some good and fun reasons you will start to use video in the home and in small business just to make things easier and make them more personal.  What I see as the real reason this is viable now, however, is the price; under $1000 for the hardware and possibly some sort of small monthly payment, $50 or less, for the service.

The obvious limitation to the above technology is you must be in front of the device, which will likely be located on top or near your hd tv.  That is where the ability to send and receive video from your mobile phone or tablet comes in to play.  The iPhone4  already has, and supposedly next generation iPad will have, front and rear facing cameras for video.  Get ready, because video will begin to show up everywhere in your home and business…

What is the cloud?

When I saw a commercial on tv from Microsoft saying something to the affect of “go to the cloud” I knew this tech buzzword was finally mainstream. So, what is the cloud? And, more important, why should I care of about the cloud?

What is the cloud? Instead of storing your data (mail, photos, spreadsheets, etc) locally on your computer on your business servers it is stored on servers usually located at a large data center anywhere in the country, or world. The cloud name comes from the picture or diagrams used to describe networks which showed the data centers out on the Internet in a cloud. So, the cloud is really just a bunch of servers, which are just computers, located in a big building with specialized cooling, power backup generators, fire suppression systems, etc that allow users to access their data from anywhere on the Internet.

The cloud can be a good idea for you and your business or maybe not such a good idea.  It really depends on your view and needs regarding security, availability and other factors.  If you consider that something like Google’s Gmail or Yahoo mail is really just a cloud mail application then it is easy to wrap your head around what the cloud is and what it offers.  In the above two examples, your mail is stored on servers and you may access it from any Internet connected computer with a web browser.  As some Gmail users experienced over the past year or so, sometimes your mail is not accessible if the servers are down or there are Internet connection issues to the servers.

Why you should care about the cloud matters how you use technology. One example of how the cloud benefits business is that it allows mobile/remote users to access information through the Internet directly. That may not seem all that revolutionary because many businesses already allow remote users access to business information, and I agree.  However, for some small businesses without IT experience they can quickly and inexpensively setup document sharing and email for their employees.  There are always caveats, though, such as, are your emails and documents being crawled, stored and searched by the companies hosting your information on their servers?  That may be disturbing for some users and especially for some businesses.

I don’t want to give the impression that the cloud is bad in all respects and I recently came across a particularly useful cloud application scenario: storing virtual server backups and even hosting the virtualized servers during disaster recovery situations.  This is an example that illustrates both some of the advantages and limitations of the cloud.  Utilizing on site servers and data storage in most cases reduces costs and allows for faster access.  Internet connection speeds have come a long way but sitting in your office at 100Mbs or even 1000Mbps is much faster than an air card or a wireless connection at Starbucks (trust me I frequent the coffee titan daily).  However, in the event of a disaster having your server data and images of the server drives stored online in the cloud can literally save a business if their server room or entire building is destroyed or more commonly the case, flooded.

I’m beginning to digress, into the technical world, so I’ll wrap up by reiterating; the cloud simply allows you to store data on servers out on the Internet.  Again, this is not revolutionary, we’ve been storing mail on the Internet for many years.  The revolution, if it does happen, is when most of your applications run from, and store data on, the Internet and not on your computer.

Amazon's cloud - EC2 - Elastic Computer Cloud

Google's cloud - Google Code App Engine

Microsoft's cloud - Windows Azure Platform

Some of the main points from the article, and issues commonly discussed regarding the cloud in general, revolve around availability, scalability and response times.  This article did not focus on the security aspects of computing in the cloud.  The three platforms evaluated are Amazon EC2, Google AppLogic and Microsoft Azure.  The gist of the article’s results are that “researchers have revealed that the infrastructure-on-demand services offered by Amazon, Google and Microsoft suffer from regular performance and availability issues.”

The take away for business owners and executives is that the cloud may not be all it was originally hyped to be.  A secondary point though, from Microsoft’s approach, is the availability of help in the transition or migration from your in-house servers, network infrastructure and apps to the cloud.

I mentioned yesterday in my post that security issues can often dictate a need for a hybrid based model combining a fully hosted cloud with your own private cloud.  The hybrid based approach to cloud computing means you get the best of both worlds: accessibility, remote access and scalability from the hosted cloud along with speed, control and security from your in-house or on-premise private cloud.  It is often the case that you need to filter through the technical details and marketing hype to get down to what makes sense for your organization and pull together a combination of solutions.  That’s why it’s always good to have trusted advisers to deliver the technical solutions that meet your business goals.

it may seem like I am against cloud computing, but in fact I see it as a good option in the future. I do not think most situations/companies are ready for a full implementation of hosting their virtual servers and infrastructure in the cloud. That is where a more interesting concept, at least in my mind, comes out; that of your own private cloud. A personal or private cloud allows for full virtualization of servers and infrastructure (routers, firewalls, switches) easily managed form a large redundant machine but ghosted onsite at your business. I’ll post more about the private cloud shortly.

Cloud computing is coming whether we think it is a good idea or not. There is too much money to be made and the big guys in the tech industry are pushing the whole concept of hosted cloud computing.