You would have heard the term ‘Cloud Computing’ thrown around a bit over the last few years. ‘The Cloud’ is the Internet, so Cloud Computing is where your computer systems (programs, databases and functions) are hosted somewhere out on the Internet using someone else’s Servers. You pay for that privilege of course, although economies of scale generally work to make it quite affordable. Cloud hosting service providers typically charge on a subscription basis, with monthly fees based on number of users.

Public and Private Cloud:

Unless you’re a large company or you have complex computer system requirements, you’re probably going to be sharing computer resources with other Cloud-based users, known as ‘tenants’ – this is called the ‘Public Cloud’. It doesn’t necessarily matter much that you’re sharing resources, as long as the resources are adequate and your data is secure and backed up. An example of this type of Public Cloud offering is Microsoft’s Exchange Online / Office 365 system.

‘Private Cloud’ takes this a step further, with services and storage on dedicated servers at a service provider’s data centre (or onsite in some instances). Typically this is more expensive, and requires a dedicated high speed Internet connection. It is gaining favour with larger businesses who like to outsource many of their IT functions to specialist hosting providers.

Hosted Email Services:

One of the easiest systems to move to the Cloud is email. You’re probably used to it already: if you have a gmail or hotmail account, then your email is already cloud-based. These days a number of vendors offer cloud-based email for businesses using hosted Exchange. This is where a Microsoft Exchange Server, somewhere in the cloud, hosts mail for your domain. You access your mail using Outlook, just as you would with a local Exchange server. From a user’s point of view it makes no difference whether email is hosted on-premise or in the cloud. From a company viewpoint, there is one major advantage of a cloud-based mail system: the company does not have to provide the hardware or physical resources to host the email system.

We install and support Microsoft’s Office 365 hosted email system, which has become the most popular email platform for small to medium businesses. Microsoft charges for this service either monthly or annually based on number of mailboxes, and either with or without the Microsoft Office desktop software suite bundled into the subscription charges.

Storage of Documents in the Cloud:

Microsoft’s OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online services allow storage of your documents on Microsoft’s cloud-based servers. With higher speed Internet connections (Fibre or NBN) becoming the norm, there is no longer a significant speed or performance impediment to storing documents off-premise. There is also the embedded capability to synchronise your cloud-based files to a local folder on your computer.

Local Server-based Storage:

It is often a good idea to plan for an onsite Server to house data, even for smaller organisations, especially where you operate with large data file and folder sizes, or have a fairly slow Internet connection. One of the big advantages of a local server is speed of access to your data. Of course you have to put security in place to protect the data, including a good backup system.

Hybrid System:

These days a popular approach is to have a hybrid system, where data is stored and accessible on the local network via a Server, and the email system is cloud based. This type of approach generally works well, with documents available locally from the Server, and mail sending /receiving to and from the cloud-based host operating as a background task.