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The opportunities and challenges of migrating to the Cloud.

Chances are, you’ve heard of the term, ‘cloud computing’ innumerous times in the last couple of years. From full–featured photo editing suites to remove servers that run games for you, technologies that enable off–location computing have changed the face of the internet–Google Docs, Picnik, OnLive, Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure are just a few of the leading examples of cloud computing applications.

Last year, Gartner Inc. identified cloud computing as the top strategic technology area for 2010 and predicted that the revenue of this sector was likely to grow from 56.1 billion US dollars in 2013. It further highlighted that the (globally debatable) economic downturn of 2007–9 has been partially responsible for making businesses worldwide turn to cheaper alternatives over buying expensive hardware, hiring, and then training. IT staff to maintain the show.

Gartner defined cloud computing as “a style of computing where massively scalable     IT–enabled capabilities are delivered ‘as a service’ to external customers using internet technologies”. For organizations, especially small-to-medium-sized companies, the ability to move IT infrastructure ‘out of their basements and, up into the cloud’ allows them to strategically cut costs and promote innovation. Service providers, such as Workday, Salesforce, Rackspace and Sun, among others, offer a range of services that are meant to help companies shift focus from the technicalities of IT infrastructure management to their core business. To say the least, anything, from customer relationship management (CRM) and talent management solutions to scalable development servers and accounting software, the cloud has it all.

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The benefits of cloud computing can be illustrated by studying Fonality, a business telephony service provider that specializes in deploying Internet Protocol – Private Branch Exchange (IP – PBX) systems. Some of their products include the award-winning PBXtra (on – premises or hosted) for small businesses and call centres, and the open – source trixbox PBX software. Fonality, founded by Chris Lyman, is now in partnership with Dell Inc. Two years ago. Dell introduced a product called Fonality Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone system targeted towards their enterprise customers. In December 2009, Lyman decided it was time to embrace the cloud and move to online services provided by Google. Hence, e-mail, documents, spreadsheets electera, were moved from locally run applications, such as Microsoft Office to the cloud-based Google Apps. In his blog entry, Lyman excitedly stated. “all our calendars are ‘webable’ and shared. Adios crashing amll servers, Au revoir, IT budget to manage them. Heck, I can – and often do – run my entire business on a 300 – US –dollar netbook.”

Cloud computing tutorials

To be continue…….