Scheidydude's Blog

What is the Cloud?  I’ve been asked this a few times.  By friends, family, small business owners; people who are more focused on their lives and livelihood than they are on the latest (or not so latest) trends in technology. 

A cloud is a mass suspended in an atmosphere.  How could this possible relate to the Internet.  Well, this relationship actually goes back further than the Internet.  The term cloud, or more specifically, the diagram of a cloud has been used for decades to refer to a distributed network of inter-related services such as electrical power grids and telephone networks.  Instead of drawing out every node covering the entire network, architects would draw a cloud representing the larger external network used to connect the nodes they were concerned with.  As Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and dial-up modems slowly gave way to Internet Service Providers (ISP) and broadband connections, the cloud diagram naturally fit to represent the Internet.  So, by that association, the Cloud is the Internet.

However, that is but the simplest of definitions.  The Cloud represents so much more.  Cloud Computing, Cloud based Storage, Cloud based Applications, Software as a Service…the list is potentially endless.  What I want to attempt to answer here is the most common question I am asked.  What do they mean by “moving to the Cloud”?

In essence, any company that offers Internet access (access without the need of specialized software or hardware) to corporate resources (be it email, files, contacts or more) is in the Cloud.  But that is exactly the opposite of what they mean by “moving to the Cloud”.

“Moving to the Cloud” means moving those corporate resources such as email, files, backups, applications, etc…, to non-corporate assets hosted in the Cloud.  Applications, email, files, almost all IT related functions and internal expenditures can be moved to the Cloud.  This allows companies to reduce or refocus staff, remove technical liabilities and overhead (server room cooling, electrical, even insurance), and concentrate on adding value to the business instead of supporting what could become aging software and hardware dependencies.

But as nice as that may sound for the bottom line of your financial statement, it’s not that simple, or that quick.

In my next post I will address (what I see as) the pros, cons and possible pit-falls for moving to the Cloud, especially for the small to mid-sized business.