You've probably heard the term. But what exactly is cloud computing? Any why are many businesses so psyched about it?
Well, cloud computing is term that applies to delivering services over the Internet. It is typically paid for on-demand - by the minute or megabyte or some other basic unit.
For example, suppose you want to deliver video to your clients over multiple platforms (browsers, mobile devices, etc.). Without cloud services, you will likely need to purchase expensive hardware and software to encode your videos into formats optimized for each platform. And, you'll need to know what those formats should be. You'll end up with expensive infrastruture that is capable of encoding millions of videos a year even if you only need to do hundreds or thousands. With cloud computing, you can "rent" the hardware and software necessary to do the same job, and only pay for the resources you use - which will likely be pennies per video rather than spending thousands on setting up in-house infrastructure.
Can you trust your data to "the cloud"? That's not an easy question to answer. Most cloud service providers have a very good security record. However, "very good" is often not good enough. Depending on the data in question there are also legal requirements (privacy laws, SOX compliance, and others) that may be hard to accomplish with a cloud based system.
We can help navigate you through these decisions and find the right fit for your business. Often times this requires a hybrid approach - hosting your own website and keeping all confidential data secured there while tying into cloud services for certain specific needs.