I think all the techies have gone crazy over the word cloud hosting services and made a mess of the word for a lay man. If you are not all that concerned about how clouds are formed then there is little you can benefit from going into the technical details of the word cloud, same way as you know very little about the term web. What is important about cloud is that it is a network which one can access from the web.
In fact cloud hosting is not as foreign a concept as it might seems to be, if you use Google you are already using cloud, as Google was the first one to use this technology.
The concept of cloud hosting is simple- that it takes the services off the desktop and put it in the cloud. Whenever your desktop would want to access the services it can easily access it from the cloud through the web. Let us first see what are the benefits of cloud hosting services before going into its draw backs.
First and foremost it completely finishes or reduces the initial investment in the IT department of the company. Although many big players have made the case that in the long run their costs are recovered but that’s for the big players only, if you have not figured out the IT department then chances are that you are far better with your services hosted than creating a whole new department.
Another big factor is that it allows you to give complete attention to your business, if you have a glitch in IT then just call the company that is hosting the service for you.
Then you have the problem of security requirements, this itself is a pain enough to not to maintain an IT department. Anybody who has actually got those requirements fulfilled can tell you this.
Then cloud hosting allows you to access your data from anywhere you have internet access, no trouble of working from office only. On top of this it is safer and easily manageable.
Last but the most important is that your every data has a back up, most hosting companies offers two back-ups and guarantee to keep it secured- is the hosting companies head ache.
The downside is not so much for the individual company but as a trend. Like if cloud hosting takes over completely then you would not know yourself where your data is kept. Now that is scary isn’t it? But in all probability things will balance out as it is in the favour of the hosting companies to keep your data safe and it is this interest which will create the balance in the long run. Same inhibitions when we started using internet or many other technologies.
Whether we like it or not Cloud hosting services is here to stay, not that it will out date on-premise installation but it will surely bite a major chunk of it.
William smith is IT analyst at Real Time Data Services. The company is major QuickBooks application service provider with specialization in accounting, tax and CRM application hosting and cloud hosting services. The company is the largest Hosted QuickBooks service provider in the cloud environment. Peachtree, MyOb and ACT! CRM are also hosted by the company in the cloud environment.
