I was recently interviewed by Mike Phillips, senior editor of Website Magazine on how cloud computing can change the way companies use IT. Here is an excerpt of my interview with him (or, alternatively, you can
read the full article).
“Perhaps the most immediate benefit of computing in the cloud is the cost savings for businesses. By using services in the cloud, many costly overhead items can be bypassed, such as servers, storage and expensive software.
There are many complete solutions for small and medium businesses that will enable a fully functional website without ever needing a server, Web host, design team or self-hosted, costly software. Sitemasher is one of them, offering hosting, design, SEO tools, CMS, analytics and more for one monthly fee. ‘Hosted CMS are very expensive,’ says Nicole Denil, VP of Marketing for Sitemasher. ‘Through research, what we found was that companies were looking at cost of implementation, but not every day costs, like hosting and management.’
But working in the cloud does more than save startup costs. Beyond the need to purchase software, servers or storage space, traditional website management involves allocating large chunks of resources in order to keep everything operating at the most basic level. But by easing the burden on infrastructure through cloud computing, businesses can get back to what’s really important. ‘Cloud computing is changing the way that companies operate,’ says Denil. ‘It shifts the way people think about their infrastructure and whether or not they should be spending their resources on it. You can shift resources to the actual business itself.’”