Cloud covered
Chris Tella made it through the October nor”™easter and Tropical Storm Irene relatively intact ”“ but not in the nor”™easter of March 2010 when a 65-foot tree toppled onto his Greenwich house.
Through it all, the roof never caved in on his cloud-services provider UFlexData and parent company Mandragore, with Tella able to access all his company”™s critical data and software from mobile devices.
As small businesses get increasingly comfortable with the idea of running their information technology out of the cloud ”“ housing applications and data on remote servers run by others ”“ a building formation of relatively small cloud service providers like UFlexData is selling those services locally.
A functional cloud system for many small-business needs comes in at half the cost of many mobile phone plans, according to Tella, executive vice president of sales for UFlexData. Yet many businesses still associate the cloud with a sky-high bill up front and going forward.
The very term “cloud” keeps some small businesses away from making that first call, seeing it as up in the stratosphere where engineers from IBM Corp. sport, despite Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM pledging $1 billion in financing last September to help small and mid-size businesses get onto the cloud.
“They came up with something that”™s actually quite nebulous,” said Marc Lotti, founder and CEO of Mandragore and UFlexData. “People don”™t know what it is, and naturally when there”™s nothing tangible, there”™s fear. When you are asking businesses to trust and put their … digital assets into something nebulous, you are going to have a hard sell.”
Opinions are mixed on how fast small businesses are adopting cloud technology. Analysts with Stamford-based Gartner Inc. say small businesses are adopting cloud services at double the rate of larger corporations, in part due to an easier transition with fewer existing IT applications to switch over.
Each year, Microsoft Corp. surveys small and mid-size businesses globally on their expectations for adopting cloud computing ”“ in the 2011 survey, more than four in five businesses polled said buying cloud services from a local provider is important.
In Computer Sciences Corp.”™s own survey of cloud computing, U.S. respondents overwhelming cited the need to help employees who rely on differing devices, rather than any worries about being able to access information in cases where their businesses were disrupted.
Still, Xerox Corp. lists disaster recovery as one of the main reasons for businesses to enroll in its own cloud services, promising full restoration within 24 hours to companies suffering an interruption.
Norwalk-based Xerox targets its service for companies with at least $10 million in annual revenue, selling through a network of resellers rather than taking on the cost of marketing the service to myriad companies itself.
“Cloud technology is often presented as a complex, ”˜big company”™ infrastructure solution,” said Ken Stephens, senior vice president of Xerox Cloud Services, in a statement. “In fact, managing IT operations in the ”˜cloud”™ is just as relevant and affordable for smaller companies and can be even more impactful.”
At the Connecticut Technology Council”™s IT summit at Mohegan Sun late last year, the chief technology officer of storage computing giant EMC Corp. argued that businesses no longer need to know how servers are operated. If they can provide a credit card number, they can get on the cloud.
“For the first time, the IT monopoly seems to be crumbling,” said Chuck Hollis, CTO of EMC. “We have a generation of business users that are not shy about looking at internal IT has yet another source of (external) IT services.”
Editor’s note: This article was corrected from previous versions running online and in print that incorrectly listed Lotti’s and Tella’s job titles.