To suit your current situation there are various levels of Cloud services available on the “cloud services spectrum”. At one (the low) end is IaaS or “Infrastructure as a Service”. At this level the Cloud provides an unmanaged level of mutually agreed upon resources at a mutually agreed upon monthly rate and term. At the other (the high) end is PaaS or “Platform as a Service”. At this level the Cloud provides tools and management services for application development and deployment on a scalable as needed basis with an SLA guaranteeing uptime, etc. Between these two levels there are many variations of the Cloud concept which offer effective services. In addition, SaaS, or “Software as a Service” refers to delivery of an application by an application vendor whereby the application software is hosted offsite, generally at the vendor’s site, and accessed by a user remotely.

Why the Cloud?

PEACE OF MIND

Your Platform is hosted at the cloud provider’s data center and is maintained by experienced engineers on a 24/7 basis. No having to deal with pesky headaches like downtime, error messages, updates, app installations, reconfigurations, etc., etc. It’s all done for you in the Cloud.

Scarce financial resources otherwise earmarked for hardware, software, professional services, and support can be allocated toward mission-critical application deployment. By focusing company efforts in this way, all-important productivity improvements are recognized – free of the worry and time necessary to maintain the IT Platform.

MORE ECONOMICAL?

The expectation is that a Cloud Solution will be more economical than a premises model. Since the use of the Cloud is scalable, only required resources are utilized. In addition, financial resources otherwise allocated for capital expenditures are dramatically reduced. There are on-going monthly expenses for the Cloud service, bandwidth, etc., and they can be considerable. A rigorous feasibility /ROI study will be performed to analyze profitability.

Yes, hackers exist in the Cloud environment, therefore users are advised to make sure their security needs are met by their Cloud provider.