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I was talking to a friend who was looking at an expensive upgrade of his office file/print server and email server. And it got me thinking.
A lot of small businesses have these servers in their office, and they cost a bomb. But really, what do they do?
You can get email these days at no cost from Yahoo or Google. Why pay for email software, let alone an email server? Free is good, but even Google’s premium business email is only $50/yr. And calendaring is included.
A shared file server is now available at a fraction of the cost of what it used to be. Because we can use Amazon S3 to store the files, and Jungle Disk to make it easy to get at them. A 100 Gb shared file server might cost $20 to setup and $15-25/mth in storage and bandwidth costs.
You can print wirelessly. Even do backup wirelessly.
This all works for Mac, Windows and iPhones (wireless backup possibly only for Mac at this stage).
All in all, it seemed like a small office could run a lot of its expensive computing needs from the cloud. That is, from the Internet.
So I drew up this diagram to show how it would work. It is dead easy to setup. Don’t even need a technician.
If you can run a lot of your office in the cloud, you avoid a lot of cost. Hopefully in the not too distant future a lot of those servers will be redundant.
Some may be concerned that Amazon S3 or Google might go offline. Or the Internet might go offline. Possible. But its a matter of relative risk. Local servers can (and do) fail, and local backups don’t always take place. The office in the cloud concept can be backed up. And there are probably more significant risks in a business than Amazon or Google going offline.
How much money will an Office in the Cloud save?
Looks ok.
The backup needs a bit more thought if you want to hold your backups in your hand. I think better solutions will come. At the moment most hosted disk space providers will offer a backup with a retention period of about a week, but Jungle looks good. Most corporates want a few months minimum. I’ve had first hand experience of why you would want a couple of months rollback. Dumping all your data to a backup device a few times a month will soon eat your upload/download unless the hosting company comes to the party with a special application to allow incrementals of deduplication. Jungle will change you for excessive file downloads as a backup would incur.
Maybe you just trust the hosting company. Better test their backups regularly to be sure.
Still need someone to run around and install antivirus on the PCs. They will prefer a centralized management console, but that is comming. Symantec are planning hosted AV management.
And until Google deliver their browser based OS, and then Microsoft follow suit, people will still want local applications like office, and someone needs to install these and fix them when the break etc.
Personally I don’t think all of the pieces are quite in place yet but there is enough there for small companies of three to ten to hang in there and I think this will be changing very fast now.
It is expecially appealing if you are a startup as you don’t have any baggage applications that you need to convert. You just go cloud from day one.
Good points Svend.
We’ve moved on a bit since this initial take.
We use S3 for our server backups.
And Dropbox.com serves a dual purpose:
- shared folders
- offsite backup for important business docs
Running Google Apps via webmail interface, no need for antivirus.
But I agree desktop apps will be around for a bit yet.