During my short time back at The Hireman I have been investigating how to migrate out current IT infrastructure on to the ‘Cloud’. As I have found, the Cloud is a woolly term for anything that isn’t tangible and sitting in the corner of your office, instead it refers to virtual services hosted elsewhere. My key objective was to take our current IT infrastructure and place it all on the Cloud. Easy I thought, how hard can it be?

Cloud computing is marketed as a cost, energy and resource saving solution and my initial enquires revealed that The Hireman was the perfect company to embrace Cloud technology. With excitement I began to meet with various companies who attempted to sell me their proposed solutions. The first hurdle I faced was that there are several ways of utilising Cloud technology, as ever prices vary greatly. Many of the companies were keen to sell a fully hosted solution meaning that our users would log directly on to a remote server. Although this in principal meets our needs it also creates its own problems such as being completely dependent on our internet connection and it also works out to be much more expensive than our current solution. The other alternative is to simply recreate our current setup on a hosted server. Again we would be dependent on our internet connections but this would also create its own problems; printing would take longer as the print job would be sent to the server then back down to the printer; computer updates would be problematic as data would be sent across the network eating bandwidth. These problems can be resolved using print and utility servers at each site to propagate data locally, but this in turn leads to higher costs in maintaining the servers. Before I knew it I was back to square one.

Ultimately the Cloud does offer many benefits but when weighed up against the financial commitment required it is very difficult to justify the ongoing expense. Virtualisation of our current servers seems to be the next logical step in building more resilience into our current set up. Although having a Cloud infrastructure is impractical at present we have started to embrace Cloud software services such as Google Docs to help unify our office staff and I hope that as technology moves on we will be able to take advantage of new innovations and services.