By Jon Schackmuth
Savvy business owners looking to get in the cloud are looking for flexibility, security and reduced cost.
The underlying question is: Can small and medium sized businesses find what they are looking for in the cloud at a price they can afford?
Let’s start with flexibility in the cloud. Simply put, this is what the cloud does best. When the marketplace changes and we all know it does, the cloud allows business owners to turn the dial up or down as needed. As an example, if a business jumps from 1,000 hits to 50,000 hits on their website and it’s positioned at a cloud hosting company like BlueLock, running on virtual machines, they can call the 24/7/365 operations staff and spin up more virtual servers – scalability on demand. Conversely, if traffic slows in six months, simply turn the dial down and pay for the services being utilized – the beauty of metered usage…
Now that we have established that the cloud is flexible, the true objection of the cloud must be security. Security is paramount when it comes to companies like BlueLock. If in doubt, schedule a visit and see the layers of security BlueLock has to offer. BlueLock’s privately owned building is made of poured concrete with a steel and concrete roof. The actual servers are secured behind six levels of security and are accessed on a need-to-know basis. - TOUGH.
The use of Check Point firewalls and SAS 70 certification is the gold standard in the IT world and BlueLock utilizes both to protect its clients. Ask yourself: Where are my servers stored and who has access to them? What if your servers crashed today? What is your disaster recovery plan and how long could your servers be down before you start losing one customer? What is the value of that customer? These questions may be hard to answer, but the results could save your livelihood. BlueLock has all of them answered for you, 24/7/365.
At this point, if I haven’t given you enough to think about with flexibility & security, you are probably in the mindset that it’s too costly! Consider the amount you pay for your infrastructure. Excessive CAPEX (capital expenditure) can bankrupt a company faster than a lack of customers. What does it cost to build your own data center plus a back up site and then maintain it at the level that allows you to sleep at night?
Depending on the situation, the business may be a start-up or they may be upgrading existing servers. If you are a start-up, what do a full time IT employees cost? If you build for today and you hit the home run you planned for, your company may be crippled. If you spend too much CAPEX on IT infrastructure, you may not have enough left over for marketing and sales generating programs. Once the original hardware purchase has been made, switching to outsourcing and OPEX (operating expenditure) is sometimes a difficult decision. At some point, enough is enough when it comes to excessive CAPEX - you may need to go in a new direction and outsource – you may need to put your business in the cloud.
Having been a small business owner in the past, I can attest to each of these topics. Flexibility is paramount in any business, security is critical when clients trust you with their personal data, and cost overruns will bankrupt even the well-informed business owner. Having choices in the cloud is something that hasn’t been available in the past… Until now.
Fresh off center stage at VMware Partner Exchange 2010, BlueLock introduced its latest surprise, BlueLock CloudSuite. After years of offering a robust enterprise-level service, businesses can now have the flexibility and price competitiveness of the newly introduced Bluelock vCloud Express. For those who want managed services with varying levels of scale, security, and performance - choose between Virtual Cloud Professional and Virtual Cloud Enterprise. A business that requires onsite control of their own isolated cloud can try the Virtual Private Cloud, you own it and BlueLock manages it.
If you have questions about BlueLock's enterprise cloud computing options, please contact us.
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Because we needed another "top" list, I'd love to go through David Linthicum's latest list, "Top 5 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2010."
There are a million reasons to go green these days and economic pressure to do so (or to hold back). So here comes a great reason to go green in your data center (or data center provider): enter, cloud computing. Enterprise IT accounts for up to 40% of a company’s energy requirements. Cutting back in that area could lead to a huge decrease in your organizations “carbon footprint.”



