No this isn't a tribute to Final Fantasy VII... ;)
The folks at Trend Micro put this out to my team the other day, and I wanted to share it with all of you too. Cloud Computing has a lot of use to small & medium businesses...but uses never come without danger of misuse. This article here, discusses the myths of Cloud Computing and what the realities are. Now if you ignore the last couple of pages...the ad for TM...there's some insight in this article. Let me discuss the first 3 now, and the rest in a followup post.
Myth #1: SMBs know they are using The Cloud. - Do they? I think a lot of companies who use Gmail, Yahoo mail, facebook, twitter, picasa, dropbox and other online tools forget that those are Cloud tools. The Cloud is a nebulous thing that encompasses concepts of how technology is delivered to people, it is not a specific thing.
Myth #2: Paying for Cloud Services is more costly than buying hardware or software - Have any of you bought and managed servers these days? Do you think that a company that's struggling along and cannot afford a proper IT manager can take care of that? It's a tough call for businesses. While I think most people outside of work rely too heavily on one thing at a time (yes I have duplicate files spread out among Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive, and Copy.com...but I'm paranoid ;) ), a business needs to invest into protecting its data, and if they're too small...it's very difficult.
Myth #3: Cloud Computing slows processes down and reduces productivity - Wow that myth is so untrue it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Like I mentioned in #2, an SMB that isn't running their own servers and IT staff reduces expenses. Shoot, we have a hosting service through PCM for your Exchange and servers...and for what it costs, it can take a lot of pressure off of your company to maintain its own servers and pay someone to do it for them...including repair bills.
More to come! :)
