What are you doing in the cloud?

Question

Everybody is talking about it and a talk on a conference yesterday really sparked my interest in actually moving stuff in our business to the cloud but I'm still barely scratching the surface of what is possible.

My idea is creating an integrated project management tool that hooks up with our dev servers (Mosso/rackspace?), documents (Google docs), backup service (S3), SVN (local?), etc ... in order to quickly create a complete clean environment for a project to take off.

I was wondering what the other possibilities are, what are you doing in the cloud? What other cloud services could our company benefit from? CRM perhaps? Time tracking?

Any idea's?

Answer 1

Most clients I work for still have a monolithic IT strategy that completely abhors the idea of ANY data residing on a box outside of their control (look how long it took for the mainstream adoption of email at a lot of places).

The web we currently enjoy as users may be open, but I really can't see cloud computing take off until the corporate world has a major cultural shift on the order of the desktop computer killing off the mainframe.

Just IMHO.

Answer 2

"Big trouble coming for Cloud Computing " is a blog post that may be interesting to some here about what could go wrong in the cloud.

Right now, I don't believe where I work is doing a lot with the cloud though other departments may be using it and I just don't know much about those projects.

Answer 3

Is your desire to be "cloud based" purely one of making use of public servers and not having to invest in the hardware (or possible costs of maintenance)? Many businesses are looking at private clouds to get the scalability and reliability of a cloud based solution, while keeping their valued assets within their corporate firewalls. FexEx is doing something like this. Also, a cloud based solution which automates the provisioning of applications can greatly reduce the maintenance cost.

Answer 4

The cloud service I use a lot is Evernote to sync notes (Code snippets, pictures) with my work and my computers at home.

I also use Dropbox the sync files between different machines even with different people. I used to use google Docs a lot but it is easier to sync native files with Dropbox.

As a MobileMe user I also sync my contacts and calender items. But that's all.

Answer 5

If you have the technical chops, be sure to consider slicehost's offering over that of mosso/rackspace. It's an essentially similar service (and owned by rackspace), for considerably less money, leaving you in far more control.

I can definitely recommend doing CRM in the cloud, if you're using anything other than salesforce right now, when you migrate you'll realize you were probably crippling yourself.

As far as other options, be sure and look at basecamp by 37signals. If it fits your development methodologies, it can be very helpful.

Cloud backup is a bit of a misnomer. It gives you another copy of the data, but it's not really true backup. Real backup is a checksummed copy that's offline and preferably off-site.