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Exactly right Steve! Cloud is simply the latest buzz word which seems to have stuck for a concept thats been around for a few years but like everything, started off as the exclusive property of the corperates who had the money, and has through (possibly the most rapid improvements in technology ever seem in the last 3 years) filtered through to right down to the SME as a genuine low cost, high productivity method of bringing big business functionality to small businesses.

Interestingly we are seeing this effect bounce with corporates when it comes to hosted exchange for example.. If you are a corporate running a 2003 exchange and are overdue an upgrade to 2007 then the case for hosted is almost to good to pass up. For example we recently brought a new client onto our hosted exchange with 300 mailboxes, the client did their own return on investment analysis.. The saving was

Hey MLF,

I could do with some advise here. Over the last 4-5 days the bounce rate on our site from ALL sources has gone from something we were proud of 42% to 100%? I cant seem to get to the bottom of this but for the last 3 days, from approx 9 traffic sources 100% have bounced. Nothing has changed on the site, in our adwords or anything else?

Can anyone ofer any explination or advise on what the H*** is going on?

Thanks

Steve, If you PM me your email I'll forward some more info on VPC with a visual representation. The high level description though is:

VPC
The service delivers a possibility to use the external cloud service to utilise virtual machines in real IT production instead of only providing a platform for web applications. The VPC Service will enable a connectivity between customer datacenter directly to an external cloud and therefore enable you to build bridges between local and remote applications without losing their centralised management. The VPC helps customers to reduce cost by making it possible to outsource selected applications directly to an external entity.

You wouldn't put an exchange server in the VPC as it is to memory hungry but anything else, DC, file/print, web servers etc are perfect for this application.

Phil

Not had any issues here with big G - well except that they dont send nearly enough traffic to visit us who are desperate for our services lol

One thing I have noted with alarm over the last week since I started seeing the instant results is. On our adwords we've suddenly seen an almost 20% increase in our bounce rate which is really scary as google will start to think the site is not relevant to the searches leading to it?

I think this thread may be starting to show that the whole thing is potentially up in the air at the moment and we're not 100% sure where they'll land?

See Alison, yet another big advert for local business.

Vendor neutral doing really cause us headaches as out tech team is top class. I would put our team agains't most in UK at least. Our #1 USP is our service, as a example of this we have built over 6000 users on out hosted exchange and not ONE has ever left us in over 2 years.

Some of our services are much more complicated than this but the service ethos runs throughout the business and did from the start as our key USP.

In computing things go wrong no matter what measures you apply. It's how you react to and manage the incidents with the utmost understanding of how this can impact on your clients business that defines you!

What we see currently is to many providers are desperate to rush services to market to say they are "in cloud" without them being completely robust and optimised for the user. Many of these companies will fall away as the product set matures and those who did it right, will emerge. We aim to be in the latter group

Oh and Pleeeesse fibre to my house! we get a whopping 3mb to our house yet have a 100mb bearer into the office.... How frustrating is that!

Lol, does it ever, Alison has lots to say and all good

A lot of very good points well made there Steve!

Like you where cost would allow I would opt for the dedicated server route, however many SME's cant afford this option and thats where cloud comes into its own.

The earlier solutions you mentioned were certainly vulnerable to the issues you mention, however in the last 12 months alone massive strides have been made in the technologies thanks to the war between Microsoft, google, Amazon and others to get a leg up on the competition.

Smaller vendors like Cloud4 Computers have the luxury of being vendor netral and can implement the best solution set for each service we provide and build it with resiliance across multiple data centres.

We are developing new several new services but our ethic is only to release them to market when they are bomb proof and, importantly for us, best in market!

We all accept that cloud computing is yet to mature, in fact a recent gartner report says exactly that, that cloud has 10 years to mature. But as a cloud service provider thats really exciting for us!

Looking ahead, our next services to market will be robust and available by xmas and are:

- Vitrual Private Cloud - VPC
- Dedicated Servers
- Colocation

Followed early next year by:

- Hosted Microsoft Dynamics 4.0

There are more Pro's than cons for simple cloud based services already like

- Hosted Exchange, (gartner predicts over 12m users by 2013)
- Online backup, (increasingly the obvious choice for DR)
- Hosted Desktop, (computing anywhere and why by a server for the network benefits)

So although I am with you Steve.. CLoud Computing is destined to be the next global shift in computing. The future is in the Cloud!

Phil

Hi all,

Very interesting special report from industry analyst Gartner about the continuing awareness and growth of cloud computing into the mainstream. A great read for all business owners.

http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocume...mp;ref=g_noreg

As the owner of a cloud computing business I am really interested in learning what the forum members understanding and experiences are with cloud (or hosted IT) SaaS services?

What are your queries, fears or objections?

Phil