customer relationship management | The Information Umbrella

On the heels of my last blog post about the opportunities for a startup, I have been thinking more about the technology infrastructure it takes to launch that startup. It turns out that it is easier than ever, thanks to managed services and distributed computing. There are a lot of very smart people willing to provide services that will help get your new product or service off the ground. In the last blog I talked about the three things you need for a startup: a great idea, awesome people, and a funding source. This week I want to focus on the work behind the curtain.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

There is very little need to deploy your own big iron any more. You can purchase and configure servers in the cloud easily. This gives you the infrastructure that you need so that your developers can create your new service or product and provide the storage necessary for all of those tasks. One of the big benefits of cloud- sourced infrastructure is scalability. You can deploy as much or as little of these resources as you need. When starting out, you can contract a small amount of services and as you grow, the infrastructure can grow with you. The set up time and learning curve are also eliminated, as well as the risk of physical equipment failure. Some vendors in this area are: Amazon Web Services, CA Technologies, HP, and GoGrid.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

If your new product or service is primarily digital, then this will allow you to deploy development, testing, and production platforms for your developers. Again, there is no need to deploy actual hardware at your startup site to have platforms available. Deploy as little or as much as you need and, again, it is scalable and additional resources can be deployed on demand. Vendors in this area are: Amazon Web Services, Google, and OpenStack.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Finally, the top layer. These are the applications that you and your new employees use every day such as customer relationship management and tracking, office applications, e-mail, accounting applications, and so on. These applications can all be maintained by others and accessed through an interface on your laptop, tablet, or smartphone. There is no need to maintain your own computers and your own expertise, thanks to many, if not all of these day-to-day applications. Salesforce.com was one of the early pioneers in this growing field by hosting customer relationship management applications. Other established and emerging companies are SAP for on-demand enterprise resource planning and Financialforce.com to provide you with necessary finance applications, through the cloud.

Thoughts

It used to be that one of the drawbacks of starting a new company is that you had a lot of startup costs associated with procuring IT infrastructure and applications. Now, what was once a barrier is an advantage because you have no legacy IT to deal with. You can start fresh and easily deploy just the right level of services to meet your needs. This frees up you and your team to finally bring that great new product to a waiting market.

About Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown is an IT professional, adjunct faculty for the University of Oregon, and academic director of the UO Applied Information Management Master’s Degree Program. He writes about IT and business topics that keep him up at night.

shutterstock_127066418 Cloud computing has been a buzz-word for a number of years now. Perhaps because it is such a nebulous/ethereal term (cloud?) that has been used to describe a number of different configurations and scenarios. You are most likely using some sort of cloud computing already but it is worth asking the hard questions to make sure you have the basics covered.

History

Cloud computing refers simply to the fact that your application or data is no longer on a computer that you can touch. It is hosted in a remote computer room in another city, another, state, or another country. In the “cloud”. What brought about this change, and why haven’t we always done it this way? One of the big reasons is the rising abundance and speed of networking. It used to be that your computer or terminal was tied directly to the computer in the computer room. Through better networking technology, the machine in the computer room and the computer in your hands became further and further separated until it was no longer necessary to have a dedicated room in every building. Better network security schemes has also increased this geographic gap.

Is cloud computing all tea and roses or are there still some lingering concerns? Think about these issues when creating or expanding your cloud computing strategy:

Security

If you contract with a large service provider such as Google or Amazon or IBM to host your application or data, your confidential information will be sitting in the same data center as another customer or perhaps even your competitor. Is the “wall” around your data secure enough to keep your information confidential. When your information is traveling to and from the data center over the network, is it secure? Has it been encrypted for the trip? Do you trust all of your information to the cloud or just the non-critical pieces?

Scale

Is your application and data usage large enough to warrant cloud computing? If you are a small company or non-profit agency, the setup for hosting your applications and data may swamp your entire IT budget. Some application service providers only cater to large customers with millions of transactions per month. If you don’t fall into that category then perhaps your IT person is just what you need. At the other end of the scale, some small companies or agencies use free services such as Dropbox or Google Docs. If this is the case, then check your assumptions about security.

Applications

Some applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) or simple e-mail or backups may be easily offloaded to another provider. Other applications may be complex or proprietary to the point where it makes more sense to keep them closer to the vest. They might still be a candidate in the future as you peel back the layers of legacy and move toward standard applications.

These are all questions to consider when formulating your cloud computing strategy. It can be a real cost savings to offload your computing to another provider but without careful consideration, it can become a complexity you did not bargain for. What keeps you up at night in terms of your cloud computing strategy?

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