In a recent survey carried out by a group of marketing students in IT Tralee on IT training needs of SME’s in Kerry. 83% of business owners stated that upgrading technologies is to costly, whereas 90% of business felt that their dependence on IT was increasing over time, s 55% of business owners felt that there business success was dependent on having correct It in place.
One solution for businesses is to examine the potential that cloud computing can offer them. As services provided through cloud computing technologies are paid on an as you use basis similar to any utility bill, e.g. ESB, Phone, there is no need for a large initial investment in computer equipment.
One proviso though for all businesses in rural Kerry, successful adoption of cloud computing technologies requires high speed broadband.
The services offered by cloud computing providers can be loosely split up into the following categories:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) with IAS you buy access to computing hardware through the Internet, such as servers or storage.. Hosting your website is a simple example of IaaS: you pay a monthly subscription or a per-megabyte/gigabyte fee to have a hosting company make your site available on the Internet 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Businesses and individuals also use IaaS to store their backups or photographs and videos. Amazon Web Services are an example of IaaS.
- Software as a Service (SaaS) means you use a complete application running on someone else’s system. Web-based email and Google Documents are perhaps the best-known examples.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) means you develop applications using Web-based tools so they run on systems software and hardware provided by another company. For example, you might develop your own ecommerce website but have the whole thing, including the shopping cart, checkout, and payment mechanism running on a merchant’s server. Force.com is a good example Through Force.com, Salesforce opened up its infrastructure so that it can be used for custom app development, that will run on Salesforce’s servers.
From where we are with the broadband speeds in West Kerry anyway this solution might seem a little bit down the yellow brick road.
