Computing "In the Clouds"

Ever think of moving your company’s servers into the clouds? (This means leasing servers from companies that specialize in doing this and accessing them remotely.)

Advantages are:

• No more obsolescence. Competitive pressures make lessors keep their equipment state of the art.
  
  
• No more downtime. The lessors worry about equipment not working. Again, competitive pressures. If their customers experience downtime, a competitor will snap them up.
  
  
• In case of power outages, employees can just adjourn to their homes, or to the nearest coffee house, fire up their laptops, and continue working. Lessors will have elaborate backup plans in place, in case power outages hits them. Reliability is what makes their leases attractive, after all.

Google and Amazon are taking this idea of taking your company’s server to a new level with AppEngine. You upload your software application to them and they take care of providing sufficient servers, network capacity, and so on. You just pay them a usage fee of so much per million uploads/downloads.

One last idea is to keep your dedicated servers in-house but have a reserve server “in the clouds” to handle peak demands.