When new technology is introduced to the market there are generally two types of movements. early adopters and the very conservative procrastinators. In most cases those that take on the challenges of new technology through beta programs or even alpha are well aware of the pit falls and possible disruptions. In fact those same bumps in the road are the justification for those that take the conservative approach, waiting for the first service pack to be introduced, or maybe the first year of production to be in the books.

While both of these approaches have merit both of them have one thing in common. IT spend is being utilized to simply survive the upgrade rather than optimize the environment. Ultimately a lot of time and energy is spent on application review and NOT on the Core part of your business.

What if there is another way? What if you could have all of the latest features with none of the risk? What if you never had to budget for a major infrastructure rebuild because of an application upgrade again? What if your IT department could spend time optimizing your business environment rather than discovering the bugs in the latest software?

Cloud Computing - is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like a public utility. It is through Cloud Computing that many of these What If’s are realized. In fact the burden of compatibility, feature function, and uptime become that of the vendor. Suddenly the latest version of Exchange is appealing. Your IT staff doesn’t have to learn an entirely new command shell to get it implemented it gets implemented over a weekend and your company simply has the latest feature set.

This type of an approach allows the IT department to focus on how best to optimize your company’s infrastructure. The new foundation for a business network can be built around protecting and securing access to the Internet. This would involve building an infrastructure that protects the user from downtime and improves the automation of on boarding new users and new applications, ultimately bringing us back to the Core part of your business infrastructure.

Foundationally, security measures need to be put into place that include protection from spyware, malware, antivirus and internal user corruption. Exploiting group policy management, incorporating roaming desktops, establishing web filters, and developing API’s are all things that can make your users computing experience more efficient.

Gone are the days where Small business has to be less efficient because of the high costs of implementation and adaptation. As a SMB cloud computing has opened up a tremendous amount of opportunity at a cost that can’t be beat.

By: Raymond Lolley - Director

For more information you can email me directly at Raymond.Lolley@evolvepartners.com or visit Microsoft’s latest Cloud offering at http://www.microsoft.com/business/bpostestdrive/