Cloud computing is one of the most cost effective IT solutions for small and medium sized businesses. But the cloud isn’t the only option, and what is right for one business isn’t necessarily the best for another.
One alternative is virtualisation.
This basically means that instead of data, email and/or software being stored on an off-site server (as is the case with a pure cloud computing solution), these things can be stored on one centrally-managed on-premise server.
Rather than software or storage on each individual PC, desktop virtualisation means that staff will log-in to their machine as normal, but will run software that is actually being run on that central server.
The advantage of virtualisation is ironically, also its disadvantage. The hardware, the physical server, remains on site which may be more palatable for companies who would rather not jump onto the cloud. But it’s this hardware that will also need to be maintained in-house by an IT person.
And if your company has several premises, virtualisation might be a less viable solution.
2 key benefits of virtualisation and the cloud
The key benefits of cloud and virtual technologies can be distilled down to:
- Lower cost
- More agility
As Darren Thompson, Chief Technology Officer at Symantec, says:
“Reducing the need to purchase expensive hardware, or the time required to maintain it, is clearly a welcomed benefit to any sized organisation, especially in the wake of the current economic climate.”
The cloud certainly has the edge in both cost and agility over on-premise virtualisation, but both cloud and virtual solutions can drive substantial cost savings over the traditional in-house set up.
What all of this highlights for me is for the need for businesses to thoroughly weigh up the options. Sometimes it’s not a straight cost decision, but a political one too. Like I said at the beginning of this post – what suits one business, won’t always suit another.
So make sense of the choice before you. Speak to a knowledgeable IT consultancy – such as Onebyte – to help arrive at the best decision for your business.
As we approach the end of 2011, we can look on a world that has never been more connected.
But 2012 and the years to come look set to bring us even closer together in a true “global village”.
According to the UN, 30% of the planet’s population were online by the end of 2010, compared to a mere 6% at the end of 2000. In a separate study, Cisco found that global data traffic over the internet increased by 41% in 2010, with mobile internet data usage increasing by a massive 159%!
Next generation internet
Ofcom, in its International Communications Market Report, has revealed the great strides that the UK and the rest of the world is taking in getting up to speed with “superfast” broadband.
Superfast broadband describes when the internet service is at or above 30 Mbit/s (megabits per second – there are 8 megabits to 1 megabyte).
The European Commission has set 2020 as the deadline by which superfast broadband must be available to citizens in all EU member states. The challenge is even greater than that though, with the Commission also wanting at 50% of citizens to be experiencing service of 100 Mbit/s. Now that’s what I call super-duper fast broadband!
However, big obstacles must be overcome. A lot of the existing infrastructure facing fixed line broadband is the line itself. Most households run off an ADSL line – the copper phone line. But ADSL can seldom manage speeds of more than 20 Mbit/s – someway off the 30 Mbit/s and 100 Mbit/s targets set out by the European Commission.
To get the UK up to speed, communication providers are hurriedly replacing ADSL lines with fibre-optic cabling. Fibre-optic has the twin advantages of high performance and little loss of performance.
With internet usage growing both in terms of the number of users and the amount of data we are consuming, although great strides are being made, they can’t come fast enough…
A massive migration is happening – not of the kind seen from the Arctic on Antarctic as in Frozen Planet (by the way I’m loving this series – for the rest of the post, please try to read in the style of Sir David Attenborough…).
No. This great migration of which I speak does not pertain to caribou or penguins; it’s happening in the world of business. Hundreds of thousands of businesses on this side of the pond and in the US are migrating their email to the better features and support of Microsoft Exchange 2010 or Office 365.
Mimecast, an email management company, recently commissioned a survey of 500 IT/email decision making bods to ask about their migration plans. The results make very interesting reading:
- 26% are planning to migrate their email to Microsoft Exchange 2010 or Office 365 in the next 6 months
- 57% will be migrating in the next year
- And a whopping 77% will be making the transition within the next 2 years
Why are businesses migrating to Microsoft Exchange 2010 and Office 365?
There are many reasons why this mass migration is occurring:
- It’s cheaper. Jacob Jaffe, Microsoft Office Division Business Group Lead says that “a customer currently running Exchange 2003 is having to pay up to 40 per cent more to store email and archive content than a customer that has moved to Exchange 2010 or Exchange Online today.”
- Improved security
- Simpler procedures for disaster recovery
- Neat new features designed to boost productivity
- More storage
In the Mimecast survey the top four reasons were new features (57%), easier administration (50%), improved security (49%) and larger mailboxes (49%).
So I’ll end this post as I started it. With over three quarters of businesses making the transition, when will your business migrate to Microsoft Exchange 2010?
CompTIA (a professional body that represents the IT industry) has recently found that cloud computing use by SMEs in the UK is set to explode over the next 12 months.
The survey, which questioned 400 small businesses, asked SMEs which new technologies they would be adopting and cloud computing came out as the runaway winner.
Nearly half of SMEs in the UK to be using the cloud within 12 months
Thirty percent of SMEs are planning to use a cloud computing solution over the next year according to the research, joining the 18% of small and medium sized enterprises that are already doing so.
This exponential uptake is largely attributable to the twin benefits of cost effectiveness as well as the increased ability to access data and applications remotely.
Cloud computing set to transform the IT landscape for SMEs
Probably the most interesting stats to come out of the survey for me, were those from the businesses already using the cloud.
Of the 18% already on board there was a whopping 93% satisfaction level, with 81% set to increase their usage.
Cloud computing is revolutionising the way businesses conceive of IT. Not only is the cloud looking likely to gain a lot of new users, it is also clearly doing the job for the overwhelming percentage of those businesses already using the technology.
How onebyte can help your business
Our own experience at onebyte is in agreement with this research from CompTIA.
Onebyte works with you to acheive the best IT solution. We listen and deliver technology that does what you need it to, backed up by an impressive service level agreement.
Talk to us today about how onebyte can help you join the growing number of SMEs in the cloud.
The technology press has been abuzz this week after the Government’s announcement that it will aim for 50% of new ICT spending to be on cloud computing by the end of 2015.
According to Francis Maude, Cabinet Office Minister, this will make even more savings than the £300 million that’s been saved by closer scrutiny of central government’s ICT systems.
As part of a new strategy document, more spending is to go on cloud computing services as Whitehall seeks to improve ICT that is “outrageously expensive, ridiculously slow, poor quality, and [...] rarely user-centric” (as branded by the Government’s Director of G-Cloud, Chris Chant).
Cloud computing, the strategy document says, will deliver £120 million per year in cost savings to the UK Government. Normally “cost saving exercises” means a detriment to quality of service, but the Government is confident that this won’t be the case.
Francis Maude expects that greater emphasis on the cloud (together with shorter term and therefore more accountable contractors) will deliver cost savings “while delivering higher standards for government ICT”.
In this blog we regularly expound the virtues of cloud computing and how it can drive efficiencies in any size of organisation. So it’s great to see the Government enter into the spirit of and commit to such technology.
If cloud computing can benefit an organisation as big and diverse as the UK Government, it’s surely an encouragement for other organisations as well as to business that they can do the same.
So although we can’t promise to save your business £120 million per year (we’ll try our best though!), here at Onebyte we’re sure we can save you an impressive amount. Why not contact us and find out how?
Not so long ago we relied on letters, fax or carrier pigeon to get our written messages to and from colleagues, suppliers and customers.
Then email came along and gave us a quicker, greener and cheaper alternative.
But email needs secure storage.
The traditional solution is an on-premise one: more and more servers, more and more hardware cluttering up your office. As the archive gets ever bigger, it takes ever more resource to keep on top of…
That’s where cloud computing can really help
Personal email providers like hotmail or gmail are already there, giving their users fantastic amounts of server space for their private email accounts. So why shouldn’t your business get in on the act?
According to a white paper published in February by Computing, there are 3 things stopping businesses migrating their email archives to the cloud:
- Concerns about security
- Fear of losing control of data by handing it over to a third party
- The work involved in migrating the data
But you shouldn’t let fears and concerns put you off without first investigating whether they are well founded.
Seek out a specialist cloud computing company with a great reputation and a robust Service Level Agreement – there’s no reason why your archive can’t be as safe and secure as it currently is – if not safer!
Computing surveyed IT decision makers to gauge what they thought the benefits of cloud email marketing were:
- 44% said scalability
- 41% said the space it would free up
- 27% said central management of email
- 22% said the security/resilience of the archive
- 20% said it enabled them to re-allocate in-house IT resource
Cloud computing can be daunting, and you’re right to be cautious about trusting just anyone with your email. But the benefits of the technology are very real, and increasing all the time.
So do plenty of research first. Speak to cloud computing companies such as onebyte, as well as other businesses using this technology, and see how cloud based email archiving can set your business free!
It’s not that easy being green – but we all know that it’s certainly the more responsible way to be.
For SMEs as much as large corporations, the need to reduce our carbon footprint is becoming an ever increasing consideration.
In IT we have a challenge. According to an article in October’s .net magazine, our increasing use of the internet and other cloud computing services means that data centres could be bigger polluters than the aviation industry by 2021.
Big data centres require a lot of energy to keep running. However, it seems that some futuristic data centres are less forward-thinking when it comes to sourcing their energy. Apple, HP, IBM and Facebook have all drawn criticism recently from Greenpeace for the lack of sustainable energy used in powering their data centres.
As we place ever more demands on the internet – as well as cloud computing services – the energy demands placed on data centres will inevitably increase. However, that doesn’t mean that cloud computing as a technology is somehow less green than on-premise servers… in fact it’s quite the reverse.
The demands on your business’ servers will increase – whether or not you opt to move to a cloud based option. So you wouldn’t be greener not opting for cloud technology. On the contrary, a hosted cloud computing solution could actually save energy – because of the economies of scale that a dedicated data centre can achieve.
I think that the migration to centrailised data centres presents us with a unique opportunity to protect the environment – why not power our data centres entirely by sustainable energy sources?
Onebyte’s state-of-the-art data centre is powered by 100% renewable energy. To be more specific – for every unit of energy used to power our data centre, a unit is put back into the grid from renewable sources. So, not only is less energy being used than if you housed your servers on-premise, it’s carbon neutral too!
Here at onebyte we’re passionate about our environmental responsibilities. So send us a message to find out more about our green credentials as a provider of cloud computing services.
Desktop virtualisation can be an intimidating prospect for any business owner, but for a small business owner it can seem positively frightening!
A recent survey by Computing revealed that 77% of IT decision makers would never virtualise desktops in their organisations.
That’s pretty unequivocal.
“Never”.
It all boils down to the perception of the cost of moving over to a virtual solution. 54% came right out and said it: we won’t change becasue we’re worried about the up-front cost.
Other than cost, some businesses were worried about how desktop virtualisation would integrate when considering:
- the working patterns of users
- the culture of the IT department
- the requirement to re-train staff
Sound familiar? Well, change is difficult to manage. Cost is one thing; winning hearts and minds is another.
On the other hand, not entertaining change would be to ignore the problems with your current IT solution.
Managing your desktop estate is expensive – it costs money and time (or more money as it’s otherwise known). In their white paper Computing quotes Gartner – they estimate that maintaining just a single desktop in a 2,500 desktop company is £80 per month.
A virtual desktop solution can cut these costs, not increase them. On top of that it increases manageability of the desktop estate and security, as well as considerably easing the cost of supporting and maintainance.
So don’t let worry about cost prevent your business saving money and working more efficiently. Change is hard at first, but you’ll find virtualisation a good deal easier than you might expect.
The point is: don’t be one of the three quarters of businesses who are prepared to judge desktop virtualisation before being in posession of the cold hard facts. Onebyte can provide your business with a bespoke quotation based on your needs. It can’t hurt to find out can it?
The cloud can be at least as fast as conventional hosting environments, and when the total cost of ownership is considered it becomes an extremely compelling solution that businesses can not ignore.
This report should reassure any IT leader who has been cautious about adopting the cloud because of uncertainty about performance – but our research proves that good performance comes by design, planning and good management, not by accident.
In tests carried out, Microsoft Azure and VMware public cloud both performed well, while Amazon EC2 (AWS) performed the least well of the four environments. This in no way suggests that AWS is the least “good” cloud option; in different test conditions using a different application, AWS is quite likely to outperform the rest of the group.
Intechnica have calculated total cost of ownership for four environments. The figures reveal some interesting insights into how the cloud can be considerably more expensive than physical environments if not used intelligently.
Main findings:
1. The cloud is different to conventional physical hosting environments, and it requires intelligent upfront and ongoing management to maximise the benefits and avoid the pitfalls.
2. Not all cloud solutions are the same; consequently, they need to be considered separately and dealt with differently to achieve optimum performance.
3. Applications need to be designed or modified specifically for the cloud – simply migrating conventionally hosted applications is likely to result in failure.
4. The cloud is a liberating and enabling technology: businesses can have confidence to conduct proofs of concept and take greater risks with technology choices without the fear of large costs, significant deployment of resources and long-term commitments to third parties.
So if you want to reduce your business overheads contact us today and we can advise you on the best solution for your business needs. We have solutions for all nature of business no matter how big or small.
Click here to download the free whitepaper
The white paper & research quoted above has been supplied courtesy of Intechnica.
How would your business cope if disaster befell you? What if your server packed up? What if there was a power outage? What if there was a flood or a fire?
These are important questions to consider – how quickly your business can bounce back from such events will determine how quickly you get back to profitable activity.
The traditional solution has been tape back-up. But in an increasingly fast-paced business environment, tape is unravelling. According to a recent White Paper by Vision Solutions “40% of restoration attempts from tape fail”. If your recovery and restoration is anything more than a very simple matter – tape can be found seriously wanting.
Tape’s also expensive – particularly if you have to back-up from multiple locations. It can be slow as well - complex disaster recoveries and restorations – the loss of a server for instance – could take you a couple of days to effect.
So tape has “inherent problems that can quickly go from inconvenient to disastrous”, Vision Solutions says.
How is a cloud computing solution better?
There are 2 reasons why cloud beats tape for disaster recovery:
- It’s cheaper and
- It’s quicker
At onebyte we manage cloud computing services at our secure data centre. Your information is backed up daily – in two different places. As your data is stored off-site, if a physical disaster befalls your business, it wouldn’t befall your data. If a physical disaster befell our data centre, your data is still saved in a secondary location.
Quickly responding and getting back on your feet has never been more important. Ironically though it’s also never been easier – so contact onebyte to find out how a cloud computing solution could benefit your business.
