Cloud computing has got some attractive offers out there. I’m going to speak about two options I think are viable for most small to medium sized businesses.
Option one - Gmail Standard Edition:
Google now offers email hosting for companies looking to host their email in the cloud. With the current costs of traditional exchange hosting, a small business should really consider the value of a cloud based solution. For one, the SPAM filtering you get out of the box from Google is amazing. Two, on the Standard Edition; you get 50 users with 7 Gigabytes of storage per user, with 10 mail aliases per user. That’s a 500 mail destinations for nothing. Three, you can brand your domain name i.e. mail.domain.tld and you can brand the login page with a company logo. Not bad for zero cost.
Option two Amazon EC2:
Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing is a terrific resource for reducing costs and operational risk. I’ve setup my company’s website (wajig.com) inside the EC2 cloud and have to say that I’m very happy with the cost and ease of scalability for our infrastructure. With features like EBS and Elastic Load Balancing we can scale to meet demands rapidly and with minimal out of pocket expense. My hosting costs have gone from $100s a month to a fraction of that since being on EC2. With software like iAWS for the iPhone, you can take snapshots of your data, add IP addresses to your AMI instances, and many other features right from your iPhone.
The biggest benefit for small companies moving into the cloud has got to be the ability to get out from underneath your current IT department. Poorly managed IT groups can hold a company hostage with missed deadlines and bloated budgets, never mind the depreciation that small companies face when purchasing hardware or managed services from other third parties.
My next post will be on the pitfalls of both of these services and what you should watch out for when moving into the cloud. As with any new technology, there are lots of things to consider when making a move of this proportion.
