exceed a threshold if you are allowance- based. Think of it as if you exceeded your text limit on a monthly mobile contract – you may then be charged per text at a higher rate.
■ Cost savings – Cost savings are an advantage that are often put forward, and in many cases this is right, as you are sharing costs with others and usually there is no upfront capital hit. But beware, as sometimes paying monthly will be more expensive over the contract term for specifi c items. For instance, if you purchased Offi ce 2007 as a boxed product for £300 and ran it for fi ve years, that’s £60 per year. If you now took out the Offi ce 365 standalone Offi ce product, it costs £8 per month, working out at £96 a year. This means that in year four it will cost you more in total. Microsoft will argue that you will always have an up-to-date product, but you may feel that you only need the features that Offi ce 2007 gives you, so always looks at the costs over the term.
■ Accessibility of services – You will gain big wins from the fl exibility of being able to access the service from pretty much anywhere you have connectivity. So, if you are on the road and have a signal (3G mobile or Wi-Fi), then you can access your service.
■ IT support – It can reduce or remove the need to recruit and retain specialist IT staff to look after the day-to-day running of the hardware. This is a bit of a sweeping statement and will not apply to all services, as IT staff fulfi l a number of other functions – not least of which is that they know your business and have its interests at heart.
■ Acting large – It will allow smaller companies to have large company setups. So, for example, Microsoft’s Offi ce 365 delivers back offi ce systems such as SharePoint
48 ECA Today January 2012
and Exchange, which would ordinarily be out
of the reach of smaller operations, due to cost and technical knowledge required.
■ Upgrades – Upgrades to the systems are managed for you, so you will always benefit from the latest technologies and latest security patches. There is a downside to this, and that is in training, as you will be forced to upgrade to the latest version after a short notice period, so you may need to consider whether this would cause you a problem. For instance, when Microsoft introduced the ribbon bar interface in Offi ce, this caused quite a lot of negative feedback. This is something you would have to handle with your staff, as you would have no choice but to adopt the upgrade.
■ Offi ce space – You can regain space back in your offi ce that once housed servers and save on the costs of power, cooling and resilience.
Cloud is essentially the delivery of a service via a public, private or hybrid network, utilising a scalable third party infrastructure
■ Scalability – Often you can scale up easily, so if you need more bandwidth or resources, that’s not a problem. Scaling down is also an option but you will most likely get penalised for doing this, as it’s not in the interests of the service provider.
What are the main challenges with cloud computing? ■ Resilience and risk – This is discussed later in more detail.
■ Security of data – Again, this is discussed later in more detail.
■ Integration – The integration of cloud-based systems with on-premise solutions can be difficult, due to moving data volumes around, while network latency can also come into play for some services.
■ Longevity of the service and company – If you are not
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