What is the Cloud?

We get this all the time – I’ve run a technology business that serves and protects small and medium sized businesses for 18 years and current manage over 3,000 devices on a 24/7 basis. It's easy to explain.

What is the Cloud? - It’s a Gym Membership

A Gym has about everything you need for a variety of sports and recreation yet you share the costs of an Olympic-sized swimming pool, tennis courts, locker rooms, spa services, and so on with hundreds or thousands of people. Everyone’s familiar with gyms. In fact, it’s synonymous with it being a shared entity – only large estates of the very wealthy would assume going to the gym meant you were going to your personal gym in the west wing of your house. The gym is a large, complex, expensive, maintenance-heavy, establishment with hundreds of expensive items that require refreshing every couple years just to stay ahead. But for you – it’s about $120 per month.

The Cloud isn’t much different. It’s just about everything you need for your business technology needs, like a $50,000.00 Cisco router to protect and serve the members of The Cloud for security and routing reasons, or the $30,000 rack, the myriads of arrays of properly specified hard drives that are 3 times the price, 3 times the stability, and configured by the utmost of professional team vs. what you find in a spam email from technology warehouse, yet you share the cost of all of this, like you do with the cost of the Olympic-sized swimming pool to make it affordable, available, clean, whether you use it or not.

In fact, the metaphor is quite apparent when envisioning the lockers - get as many as you need for your employees (every employee has a password for their locker and access levels; the business owner has a master key to every locker their business utilizes). The racks within the The Cloud look almost exactly like a locker room - just sealed and full of data, not people. 

So "What is the Cloud?" A way to get about everything you need technologically for your business without being a technology company.

And like Gyms, there are many Cloud Providers. Contact a professional to decide which Cloud Providers fit your needs best – there are differences between them. In fact, there are huge differences and the more you know before you leap, if you decide to do so, the better.

At the risk of attempting humor in an area we take seriously to the point we lose sleep - "Call our membership department at 877-AGILITY"