A recent Indian edition of Information Week had this nugget: “The true sign of a technology being adopted is when smaller enterprises start implementing a particular technology for maximizing business value.”
The journal then sketches the experiences of a small firm, demonstrating, as they say, “why cloud computing is equally beneficial for them, as it is for larger enterprises.”
Somnet Dynagraphics, a small IT firm, uses a private cloud it built with open source. Shantanu Som, Director-Technical, Somnet Dynagraphics, told Information Week that “our sales people can now load data in CRM from anywhere, which entirely runs on cloud. Our support engineers get support tickets via SMS on their mobile while on the move, bettering their response time and increasing customer satisfaction.”
Could your company use that sort of efficiency? Remember, you don’t need to be a huge corporation to get it. Som said the open source framework gave his firm low TCO -- “we have more employee engagement which translates into higher operational efficiency.”
And yes, we know you’re concerned about security. To that end, Somnet uses 128 bit encryption and OTP (One Time Password) which reaches a user via a SMS, so it’s secure “even if employees use an Internet café,” as the journal reports.
One factor of private clouds attractive to SMBs is the scalability. As Som said, one of their business units supports around 2,200 installations of high-end multifunction devices, and they manage the entire operation and workflows of that unit with their own tool “which also has a self service module for all 2,200 users.”
About a week ago TMC (News - Alert) had the news that Amax, which sells enterprise and cloud computing products, reported it will launch CloudMax Apex (News - Alert), a next generation of the CloudMax private cloud appliance.
Amax officials said the CloudMax Apex eliminates the associated complexity and excessive costs of traditional enterprise private cloud deployments with a ready-to-deploy and simple-to-manage secure private cloud solution using a consolidated appliance model, enabling companies to move seamlessly into the cloud for an immediate reduction in IT overhead and overall operational expenditure.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.
Edited by Juliana Kenny