First off, it’s important to understand that cloud computing is fundamentally about resources:

·         Structured and Unstructured Storage (kind of a hybrid of what you may think of as “RAM” or “disk”)

·         Compute power (similar to processor or CPU power)

Over the last 10-15 years, there has been a large paradigm shift in the models that we use for accessing these two fundamental resources.  This has been driven largely by the growth of available bandwidth.

I will follow this up with posts about each service, but I wanted to list a few here:

·         Microsoft Windows Azure - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/

·         Salesforce’s Force.com – http://www.force.com

·         Amazon.com AWS:

o    Elastic Compute Cloud  (EC2) – http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

o    Simple Storage Service (S3) – http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

·         Google App Engine -  http://appengine.google.com

·         Risk mitigation:

o    Downtime: Mythical “100% Uptime”

o    Data loss: Data replication

o    Server failure: Redundancy

o    Natural disaster:  Geographical distribution

·         Scalability

o    “on demand resources”

o    Available in small increments

·         Cloud Readiness assessment- Contact us!

·         Cloud Strategy – Contact us!

·         “Port my app” to cloud – rewrite apps to leverage cloud resources

o    This may be moving your database into the cloud

o    Or very “processor intense” loads to the cloud

o    Or the whole application!

o    Contact us!