cloud computing

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Notes for Pages 1 & 2 are available at Cloud Computing Opportunities. The page references are for the attachment to this post.

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Four of the main issues that come up when considering moving part of your business operation to the cloud are: Security, Access, Cost, and Ownership. It is important to consider all of these issues as they can affect your business. Only the second issue is not related to the cloud service provider.

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Cloud computing offers small and medium businesses (SMB) many opportunities to reduce computing costs and improve their internal computing operations. The attached file contains the slides from a presentation I made to a group of SMB executives. The discussion below is my slide-by-slide notes. The slides are two per page, and the notes are listed by page number. This posting covers pages 1 and 2. Pages 3 and 4 are at Cloud Computing Opportunities (Part 2).

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There are several services that meet these needs. Like the desktop solutions, some cost and some are free. These tools work by encrypting passwords you enter into your browser and saving those encrypted passwords on a server. In many cases the passwords are encrypted in the browser with JavaScript prior to sending them to the server. When you need a password, the server sends the browser the encrypted password and the browser decrypts it for your use.

As more information and applications are moving to the cloud, it is necessary to secure all of these against unintended or malicious access. How you choose to protect that information depends on the value of the information to your business. This post looks at a couple of means for protecting your business property that resides in the cloud - standard web access security, username/password authentication, two-factor access, and encoding.

There are many options for moving all or part of your computing operations to the cloud. The particular options chosen by each business is dependent of the particular needs of your business, the people working for the company, the current computing environment, and your competition. As with any major decision, the extent to migrate to cloud computing needs to be based on solid business reasons. This post will discuss two of the more basic options - web site and backups and archives.