Do you have your head in the clouds, or more specifically "your heads in the cloud"? No I'm not asking if you have wholly unrealistic and impractical ideas, I am in fact asking whether you have yet considered the cloud as part of the future of your business; whether small or large, regional or multi-national embracing the cloud could offer substantial benefit for your business.

Wait a minute, what's this "Cloud"?

In simple terms the cloud essentially refers to any hosted service that is made accessible over the internet, it provides highly available, on-demand, fully managed and almost infinitely scaleable services to consumers. The initial introduction of cloud computing saw these massive interconnected servers provide incredible amounts of computing power to scientists and researchers, however now this power is available in byte sized chunks (slices or slots) to anyone that wants it.

Moving to the Cloud

The age of computing is about to come a full circle, from its earliest days of valves, punch-cards and green screen monitors when a typical computer would fill your entire house, to the modern day computer in the palm of your hand, the smartphone. Back in the day when a mainframe would host all your business applications and service those applications to your users through terminals, to the age of a personal computer on every desk onto which all your business applications would be installed and used. Now in the age of the cloud we are moving those applications off the desktop, however we aren't moving them back to house sized mainframes, instead to vast data centres the size of football stadiums all around the world costing hundreds of millions to create and almost as much to maintain. Within these data centres the biggest players in the world of technology (Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others) provide us with all the facilities and functionality we need to run our business without ever buying a single piece of server hardware.

We are all used to have a web based mail account, most people have either a Hotmail account, a Gmail account or even both, this is a cloud service, either Google or Microsoft are taking on the responsibility of receiving and sending your email, ensuring the service is always available and serves your exact needs and providing an interface from which you can send and read email from any device, be that your smartphone or your pc.

Google has for a number of years offered internet based office productivity tools, namely "Google Docs" and its integrated "Google Apps" suite that puts email, office and social media under one Google managed roof while Microsoft has recently introduced "Office 365", a cloud service that offers their leading business productivity software to consumers across the internet instead of on the desktop.

Office 365 incorporates Exchange for Email, Lync for social and office communication and SharePoint for business collaboration. As the consumer you get all of these services, hosted and managed for you for a flat fee per user.

More Information

Office 365 - http://www.office365.com
Google Apps for Business - http://www.google.com/a
Office 365 vs Google Apps - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/28/office_365_v_google_apps/