Bringing Cloud Computing back down to Earth – 3 top tips to clear the fluff
>”If you want Elastic Hosting you need an Elastic Budget…”
I can’t take credit for this little nugget of clarity. That goes to Richard Gardner, one of our Support Engineers. But as soon as I heard him say it, the phrase struck (and stuck with) me.
Everyone but everyone is talking about and investigating Cloud Computing / Cloud Hosting / [insert Cloud term here]. But what I’m seeing over and over again is a lot of confusion as to how Cloud will work for you and your business. Or more specifically how it will magically save you money.
In retrospect, perhaps I should have preceded this post with the following statement:
>‘Cloud technologies can help companies to efficiently use their hosting budget through the efficient use of hardware for their environments.’
Now I’d like to take three words from this statement and illustrate them further:
CAN
Notice, I didn’t say a definite ‘will’ here. As with any business tool, it will not cut costs by itself. However, there seems to be a lot of fine mist out there almost seeming to proclaim that all cloud products, no matter how or if you know how to implement them, will significantly reduce expenditure. In fact, the way to look at Cloud Technologies is to ask HOW they will fit in to your business plans and budgets…
HELP
Again, I have not used a definitive word here. This is to demonstrate further that Cloud Technologies should be used in conjunction with other technologies and features in order to optimise your online environment to the full. Features that make sense for your business. Do you need 24 / 7 / 365 support? Do you need an environment that meets certain universal security standards? Do you need advice and recommendation on how best to support your environment? Elements of these features (or all of them, and more) implemented together should help a company meet their online aims.
EFFICIENCY
Need I say more… Efficiency is the buzz word that won’t go away. All businesses should strive for efficient use of technology, resource, and hardware, with cost efficiency being right up there at the top of most ‘must-have’ lists. But cost efficiency does not always equal short-term savings, and in the same way that we sometimes need to ‘spend money to make money’ it is not unfair to say that we could ‘spend money to save money… later’. In other words, using our budgets efficiently to further meet client needs, in order to increase revenue, and save on future hardware or resource costs.
So to hark back to the beginning of this post, I think it’s important that all potential users of Cloud Technologies realise that it is not necessarily an all-encompassing, and cheap, band-aid to solve all technical and expenditure woes. However, when you are willing to spend the right amount of money appropriate for your aims and budget on Cloud Technologies you can achieve the environmental elasticity that you require, along with many other benefits, to help you achieve your business needs and meet client / user expectations. Just remember to be elastic in your cost expectations, and you should be tickety-boo.
About Namuli Katumba
Namuli is Head of Account Management and Service at Ultraspeed. You can find her on Twitter at @namkat.