Moving our office this summer, we ended up having a gap between moving out and moving in. I got many questions about what we did with all our servers while bridging the gap. Fact is, though we use many such things, most of it is out there in the “cloud.”

Cloud computing is one of the new technology buzz-words, and it has intrigued me for some time. Broadly speaking, it means that instead of using locally installed software, you use services somewhere out there on the Internet instead of software installed on your computer or on your network. Files and data live there too.

Because it doesn’t really matter where those systems exist physically and because increasingly, they are spread out or distributed across multiple locations and servers, planners and architects started representing things off in the Internet as living in a cloud. The term cloud computing caught on.

Getting ready for our move, I counted up: we host web sites from companies such as theplanet.com, rackspace, serverintellect, and intermedia. For our own infrastructure, we use services up in the cloud to store code and manage software development (CVDude), files and data to manage our client projects (BaseCamp), to manage our contacts (SalesForce), and on into a fairly long list.  Email is out there as well. 

A related buzz word, Software as a Service, is also part of this phenomenon. Our private data is out there, and the software to use it is as well. In each case, there are commercial or open source alternatives that in some senses would be cheaper to license than to pay monthly provider fees. But when you factor in all the costs including hardware and security, these services look increasingly attractive.

A second wave is building. With Google Apps, organizations are moving to having a complete network environment out there—file directories, calendar, email, discussion and planning spaces, all accessible through google’s on-line software. Amazon’s S3, IBM, and Sun all have or are planning other “cloud” offerings.  Hospitals are starting put secure patient data on Google. Our BaseCamp project management provider uses Amazon for its hosting.

From an energy and environmental point of view, having fewer small servers generating heat and consuming electricity makes a lot of sense. I read that Iceland is looking increasingly attractive for giant hosting facilities because cooling is so much easier.

Reasons to consider this stuff:

• You are a small organization with limited IT management staff.
• You have staff spread over several locations, or people who work “in the field” all over.
• You have volunteers, partners, or other form of extended community for whom you need to provide access without wanting to deal with the security and access load that could add.
• You concerns about security focus more on physical security and data back-up than worrying whether Google will respect your privacy forever.
• The folks you trust for your core business or organizational software are comfortable with customizing or building things in these new environments.
• You want controlled, predictable costs for licensing, hosting, and maintenance.
• You don’t want to worry as much about upgrading office computers, since most of these cloud environments need only or little more than uptodate web browsers.

What should go up there? In our case, at least for now, our time tracking system will remain in custom software we created and host ourselves. Businesses and organizations will keep those things that are the most customized, most stable already, or involving their most private data in house.

Over time, an ideal combination would be inexpensive hosting of data in the cloud, access to Open Source applications using them, and low cost browser-oriented computers (or cell phones?) that connect to them anywhere.