Run Multiple Environments: Cloud computing allows you to virtualize almost anything from your data center infrastructure by using commodity servers. This presents a lot of benefits for everybody, from the end users all the way to the CEO of the company. Cloud computing allows organizations to run multiple environments without the need to purchase all the hardware – you can run multiple sandbox environments as well as a production environment without the huge upfront setup costs (just the cloud computing monthly service fee). This presents a huge financial benefit since organizations have the ability to run each environment with extreme flexibility and without investing in heavily-depreciating hardware.

Lower Time-to-Market: Since each environment is set up as a cloud computing service, you can afford to give each network administrator and network engineer their own environment to test out their plans (maybe not the ones you don’t favour). Once they’re done configuring their own setup on the cloud, run your tests and determine which is the most robust and efficient setup. After that, you scrap the test environments, maybe fire one or two people that failed at this task, then you migrate your production environment onto the new cloud computing setup. Don’t waste time setting up hardware setups and changing them around because with a few clicks, cloud computing takes care of all of the troubles for you. It sounds lazy, and that’s because it is, but at the same time it’s very efficient and gives you the utmost flexibility with your infrastructure. With the AppLogic cloud computing platform, you can even save all the different setups as templates and provision them as you need them – remain two steps ahead of the competition and one step behind your diet I always say. This can also be accomplished with other cloud computing platforms but I used AppLogic as a sample.

Upgrade Your Infrastructure: With cloud computing’s virtual appliances, an organization never needs to stay with a legacy setup because of hardware incompatibility: Plan and provision a new setup, test it then make it your production environment and toss out the old one! Why not? It’s not going to be on your balance sheet depreciating like traditional infrastructure, and it’s going to improve your overall performance. Satisfied users, evolving infrastructure and no depreciating hardware … why not move to an AppLogic cloud? If you don’t like saving money, time and labour then I guess you can stick to traditional infrastructure hosting. The only person coming happy out of that outcome is your debt issuers.

I hope this article was informative for you and not confusing. Overall, it’s better to have your infrastructure as a service since new technology and new software is constantly coming out. Hardware would need to be upgraded and sometimes replaced, but you can avoid that hassle and save yourself a lot of time and money while improving your performance with a virtual private data center or infrastructure as a service cloud computing.

As always, feel free to contact me at yazan [at] rightservers [dot] com with any topics you wish to know more about.

Thank you for your time and I hope you come back soon!

Kind regards,

CEO – RIGHTSERVERS.COM

Pay Only For What You Use: Traditionally, IT decision makers had to determine how much their IT needs would grow over a 6, 12, and 18 month period. This was so they can plan accordingly and purchase the right amount of power and resources to ensure their operations run smoothly. This essentially is like when your mother bought you a sweater that was too big initially but she predicted you would grow into. In my case, I just stopped growing and all my clothes were too big and I remained short. Anyways, this is one major benefit to cloud computing because you don’t need to forecast your needs and you don’t need to purchase more than you need to begin with. In this sense, cloud computing saves you money in the short and medium term. What about the long term you ask? Well, I have to say that you ask too many questions, but I will get to it.

Take Out The Hassle and Labour: It gets even better in the long term with cloud computing … you don’t have to deal with the hassle of moving your data and reconfiguring any servers when you outgrow your hardware. With cloud computing, you simply just keep adding resources and there is no need to migrate! This saves you plenty of headaches and labour so you save even more money … I sound like Wal-Mart, constantly talking about saving you money. Labour is typically one of the largest costs of managing a business’s IT infrastructure. You can lower that cost with cloud computing over traditional server hosting since you wouldn’t need to hire somebody to migrate your data and reconfigure a new server for you. You also wouldn’t be faced with the hassle of dealing with downtime and errors that sometimes rise up when migrating from one server to another, just a few clicks and you have yourself more resources.

Overall, you would have more resources at your finger tips and you wouldn’t need to bring in an expert to move your data and software to a better setup. You keep your mind on your operations and let cloud computing take care of your resource requirements. As always, feel free to contact me at yazan [at] rightservers [dot] com with any topics you wish to know more about.

Thank you for your time and I hope you come back soon!

Kind regards,

CEO – RIGHTSERVERS.COM

Reduce Labour Fees and Stress Levels: There are a number of ways cloud computing can achieve this from a technical point of view, but the one I will mention is 3Tera’s AppLogic cloud computing platform which automatically reboots the applications from the failing node (physical servers) onto a working node (all without losing any of your data… I know, it’s sweet). This is one of the main reasons that businesses of all sizes are switching over to cloud computing because they no longer have to worry about failing hardware taking their operations offline. The failing hardware usually comes with more than just a headache and a feeling that resembles getting kicked to the teeth, it comes with emergency labor fees and downtime that is crucial to your business operations. With cloud computing, you wouldn’t need to worry about that at all if you were on a public cloud (cloud that hosts numerous clients like Amazon or Right Servers) as the service provider would manage that. If you were on your own private cloud, this fix can wait until the next morning when you have a technician working a regular shift with labor rates that won’t make you pull out your hair (I think cloud computing is the reason I’m not completely bald).

Your Operations Depend on it: The bottom line is, cloud computing adds another layer of redundancy when hardware fails, and it keeps your business online and operational. If you have applications running on your servers that are necessary for your continuing day-to-day operations then failing hardware could mean time wasted and lower productivity. This isn’t just necessary for your stress levels, but extremely important if you are an e-commerce based business and the majority of your business depends on your website staying online. Down time means potential clients can’t access your storefront or your sales force can’t access their CRM system and those clients would take their business elsewhere. 3Tera AppLogic cloud platform has built in application that will help you eliminate downtime and help you get closer to staying online 100% of the time.

High-availability has become a necessity, so don’t go on without it. As always, feel free to contact me at yazan [at] rightservers [dot] com with any topics you wish to know more about.

Thank you for your time and I hope you come back soon!

Kind regards,

CEO – RIGHTSERVERS.COM

The common misconception is that business owners believe that having a website means you are competing with EVERY website in the same category as your business. For example, a small store in a local mall selling cologne and perfume believes that they will be competing against other websites selling cologne and perfume at a large discount. This is not true – not all websites have to sell a product or service nor does it even have to list a price for its products. Nowadays, the majority of consumers use the internet to collect information on certain products they are interested in. This means that they can be on your website to see if your store carries a certain brand or size of a product.

An online presence can also help place your brand name in the consumers’ minds as they pass by your business. This helps even if they do not come into your store front (they may have not needed your product at that time) but when the time comes that they need what you are selling, then the first place they will look for information is your website. Even if you don’t have your pricing on your website, you can still have relevant information for them to look at: store hours, list of products, store phone number, and most importantly, store location(s). An online presence is not aimed to compete with other online presences but more towards attracting your target niche, for most of you small businesses out there, this would be your local market.

A website is in many cases is a companies most indispensable marketing tool.  A website design can cost anywhere from $100 to a few thousand dollars, all depending on what you are looking for. After the design is finished, ongoing costs will only be your web hosting fees (Right Servers has plans that cost less than $10 per month for cloud web hosting) and domain registration fees (in most cases less than $15 per year).  There are also many cost-effective ways of promoting your brand and your website – including Facebook pages, Google Adwords and more.

As your business evolves, so does your online strategy. At this point you will need to re-evaluate your business model and determine what you need to change to meet the needs of your customers. With the wide range of service providers and web developers that will be begging for your business, you are able to meet your requirements without blowing your budget. Stay tuned to updated and more in-depth online strategies.

Thank you for taking your time to read this blog post and I hope you will visit this blog on a daily basis to check out what tips we have in store for you.

CEO – RIGHTSERVERS.COM

My name is Yazan Al-Sheikhly and I am the current CEO of Right Servers. Right Servers has been in business since 2007, but don’t let that short period fool you because some of our team members bring over 20 years of IT experience to the table.  With this vast amount of experience and our innovative mindsets, we have been capable of providing some of the best solutions available on the market.  Our solutions are tailored towards the small and medium sized businesses (SMEs). The services include but are not limited to domain hosting, email exchanges, virtual and dedicated servers, private clouds, cloud migration as well as custom cloud application development.

This blog will be routinely updated in the near future.  Thanks for reading, and I hope you visit us again soon.  If you wish to have a certain topic covered or mentioned in a blog post, feel free to email me at Yazan [at] rightservers.com and I will do my best to cover all requests.

Kind regards,

Yazan Al-Sheikhly