4. I Love Frank The Dog But What About My Business?

Good question,

How can business leverage the power of the cloud? What are some pros and cons of adopting cloud computing in business.

To answer, I would like to lay out an example based on my fictional company, BuyIT.com and their quest for enterprise email service.

Traditionally, an organization looking to establish enterprise email services would generally follow the recipe below.

1. Build a data center or computer room with which to house Enterprise computing equipment.  
2. Purchase dedicated server hardware, and Storage hardware to live in the data center.
3. Acquire in appropriate Environmental cooling; servers don't like heat we need to run the room fairly cold.
4. Develop a power strategy that includes some form of backup power so that the servers don't go down whenever the power does.
5. Design your networks, Acquire the hardware, and tie everything in.
6. Secure the environment; Bio metrics, Camera's, Access cards, Security.
7. Implement some form of backup to ensure you can recover in the event of failure.
8. Do all of the above in a second location, so that you have redundancy in case of disaster such as earth quakes, floods, fire.
9. Purchase some type of Email server software such as MS Exchange, Lotus Domino, or a variety of other email servers available on the market.
10. Software Licensing for each and every user.

So far that recipe is looking pretty expensive. even a small implementation could run into the tens of millions of dollars!

Now let's talk about staff.

At a minimum, you are going to need highly trained professionals to operate and support:

1. The Data center Facilities 
2. The Server Hardware
3. The Storage Hardware
4. The Networks
5. The Computing Platform itself (Windows, Linux, Etc.)
6. The applications themselves (Exchange, Domino, Sendmail)
7. Security
8. Compliance

That's quite a diverse array of skills. Staffing your data center, and operating your own mail server is going to require a significant up front (CAPEX,) Capital investment just to get off the ground, not to mention the ongoing cost of all of those salaries.

The lay of the land looks quite bleak if you are a start-up, or a small business that can't afford to make a multimillion dollar investment just to establish email.

Even if a BuyIT.com has managed to follow the recipe and put forth the investment now they will also begin to see some residual costs annually based on renewing support for their licenses. Not to mention growth. Every time they grow, it's going to cost them.

The best designed computing environments have limits to how well they scale; normally referred to as scale ability. 

That is to say that no matter how well you plan, a thriving business will always outgrow the original computing capability. 

That means periodically going back to the drawing board to upgrade, redesign, overhaul, just so you can add capacity.

Not to fear, there is hope for BuyIT.com.