| • | A Bureaux by any other name ? A lot of customers may have heard or read about the "the Cloud" and wondered what it means and if it could benefit them. Well over my many years in IT I have have seen many changes some good and some not so, it has also taught me that things go in circles (just like fashion!). I'll explain more - Many years ago small to medium enterpises(SME's) could not easily afford there own IT department but realised that there were many benefit's to accessing IT services. To meet this need the computer industry came up with the idea of bureaux's that gave SME's there own "virtual" computer department(VCD). These VCD's provided the hardware,software and the IT staff for SME's who, as I have said, could not afford there set up. This was fine until along came cheap computer power in the form of the PC/Server and the cheaper software that was associated with the PC/Server. Besides being cheap it meant that many functions could be brought back under totally control of the customer. The power of the PC/Server is now such that by providing economy of scale companies are able to host many customers on the one server and as they already had the necessary IT staff for support they can offer cost savings by offering to run a customers IT functions allow customer to:- 1.Reduce computer staff or gain IT expertise without employing staff. 2.Remove or reduce the number of servers the customer has to support. 3.Take away the headaches of supporting software,hardware upgrades,patches,virus support. 4.Allow dynamic increases in computer power on demand (at a price !). Hence the THE CLOUD Part2 Contd |