I've just produced a new video explaining what cloud computing is and isn't via a long analogy and a concrete example. I hope you enjoy it.

 

A lot of people don’t really understand Cloud Computing.

Cloud computing is more than just an external hard drive in the sky. That’s all a lot of people think it is: dropbox or Google drive or Office 360.

It’s not so much about cloud computing or cloud storage as it is cloud services.

The thing that makes cloud computing revolutionary is the way services can be hooked together with relative ease to create custom IT solutions for your organization.

You no longer have to license and implement large, complex, expensive software solutions.

 

Need analogy. Someone recently said it’s like a Gutenberg press? Nope, none of you have ever used one

Kit Car? Maybe, but still too hard to do

PVC pipe @ Home Depot?

 

Look up PVC on instructables.com and you’ll find plans for

Table

Chair

Laundry Hamper

Chicken Feeder

Longbow

Kayak

Speaker

Bike Rack

Marshmallow Shooter

Fishing Rod Rack

Desk Organizer

Rubber Band Gun

Ukulele Stand

Dremel Drill Press

Yurt

Planter

Trebuchet

ShortWave Antennas

Water pump

And more. Why are people able to build these things? Because the pieces are readily available, affordable, standardized and easy to hook together. So are tinker toys, why not them? They’re toys, but schedule 40 PVC is industrial-grade material that you can really make a boat out of.

Before there was PVC, drain pipes were iron: expensive, heavy and something a homeowner could never work with. But now anybody with a hacksaw can quickly and cheaply build things that have never been built before. So is the revolution from old enterprise-class software to cloud computing.

 

Let’s look at an example of a marketing letter I send out. The software and database are hosted on a virtual cloud server, the url shortening service is another cloud service (this one from Google), the QR code generator is another cloud service, and the text message phone number is yet another cloud provider. If the prospect signs up, they’re added to a mailing list hosted at another service provider. These pieces are all hooked together to make one seamless marketing piece. Think of this piece as a bunch of PVC Ts and Ls put together into a configuration that nobody has done before. This is what cloud computing enables.

So let us at openfacesystems help you put the pieces of cloud computing together to revolutionize your organization’s information technology.

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