Whether you’re a business owner or not, somewhere along the line you must of heard something about cloud computing – if you haven’t, pay attention, the encounter might be just around the corner.
If you’re anything like me, you consider yourself to be pretty tech savvy and practically able to perform miracles on computers, yet the moment the IT guy starts babbling in tech lingo, it’s like your mind suddenly just switches off. It’s kind of like going from hero to zero in split seconds. In a flash you went from bursting with how clever you are to feeling dumber than a rock. They have all these incredibly difficult-to-remember names for everything, probably only to intimidate the non-geeks – no pun intended.
Bottom line is that it’s the 21st century, and whether you’re an ignorant businessperson who wants little or nothing to do with this computing stuff or a clueless smartass that hasn’t been able to get your head around the cloud, it’s time to catch up and get informed. Well, that’s the conclusion I came to, so I started digging for definitions, Googling just about every second word until finally I was able to read and fully understand one sentence at a time. I will now attempt to share this knowledge with you in simple terms so that all of us can join in this exciting technology initiative that is taking collaboration to a whole new level.
Had my light bulb moment when I learned that one of the best known and most used clouds out there, is Facebook. That really settled the nerves and enabled me to approach this journey with a lot more courage. Never mind the jargon and complex classifications; I now knew what the concept was. And in that instant I understood the benefits it had.
Consider the amount of information stored in your Facebook account. There are multiple wall posts, photos and videos, you communicate with hundreds of friends via messaging and comments, you share links and always know who’s up to what; all of this without using a single bit of space on your hard drive. Also note that this information is readily available at any time, anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection. You are able to access your account from your PC, laptop, and smart phone, just about anything with a screen, keypad and link to the World Wide Web.
It is fantastic! You drag and drop boxes left, right and center, creating your own unique look with your personal preferences. Choose what you want to see, what you’re interested in being notified about and who can see you. Privacy and security settings allow you to dictate who has access to your account. Only you can edit information stored on your account unless you provide another person with your username and password.
Cloud computing is as simple as that. They’ve just taken the layman’s terms and laidback attitude of the social network clouds, given it a more professional look, purpose and vocabulary and called it cloud computing. The uses and benefits are endless.
Whether you’re a one-man show or a multi million dollar corporation, this computing system will undoubtedly have a variety of features that will make your life easier. Time has always been of the essence and as the world evolved and neighborhoods grew larger, so has the distance between the home and office. This traveling factor has become an additional time consuming strain on service providers. By providing a workspace with the flexibility to be available to any authorized personnel at any given time from any possible place, you eliminate the costly wastage of time it takes to travel back and forth between locations. You could certainly see how this will increase productivity, decrease overheads and simply boost your bottom line.
Cloud computing systems allow businesses to ensure that all files are kept up-to-date and always available to all relevant parties. By having everything kept in one secure location, you eliminate duplication factors and never need to search for the latest report or document as everyone works on the same file. Information can easily be shared with internal staff or outside parties, users can freely communicate with each other via comments and managers can quickly track ongoing work by always having it at their fingertips. All and all, customer relation management and collaboration becomes a dream and effectively improves your company’s proficiency.
My name is Jackie Smit and I’m an entrepreneur. Next time we’ll have a more in-depth look at some specific clouds for certain industries. I hope my enthusiasm on this topic is contagious.
