Also known as Cloud Computing, shared servers & shared IT infrastructure allows your business to share the cost of the software, hardware and services with other customers. You can focus on your core business strengths while leaving the IT Infrastructure to New Age Solutions. We manage, monitor and provision everything on your behalf.
Your business rents the Hardware and Software from NAS and pays for the services monthly as an operating cost. You don’t purchase your own Hardware, Operating Systems or Licences for essential software such as Backup & Restore – We do it all for you!
Monthly rates are negotiable depending on your requirements.
Contact us for more information
What is Cloud Computing?
Every business bigger than one person needs somewhere to store its data and run its business applications and communications, including email. A generation of businesses has installed a server — or many servers in a data centre — and hired specialist IT staff to run it.
With cloud computing, you instead rent capacity in a provider’s data centre, and connect over the internet. The provider’s staff install, maintain and upgrade hardware and software as required. Typically you’ll rent a service, such as data storage or email or accounting, rather than ‘a server’ as such, and pay $X per user or $Y per business per month.
Why is it called cloud computing?
Network diagrams have traditionally used a cloud symbol to denote ‘the internet’ or, before that, the telephone network outside the customer’s zone of responsibility.
Why use cloud computing?
Potentially cloud services are cheaper and more flexible. Because they’re internet-based, you can access them from anywhere – often including mobile devices. Most servers and internet links lie idle most of the time. Cloud providers host many businesses
on a pool of hardware, sharing the cost of servers, electricity, data links, backup systems, IT staff and even real estate. A cloud provider can quickly add extra capacity or scale it back again when you need it. Capital expenditure on servers and up-front software licenses, and the unpredictable costs of dealing with emergencies, are replaced by a predictable operational cost.
Can Cloud Computing really cut IT costs by 80%?
This number is probably over-hyped. Hardware and internet costs are dropping, but supporting end users is still a significant cost. Moving to the cloud removes the cost of maintaining your own systems, but you still need to configure the generic cloud-based service to match your business’ unique needs, train your staff and help them find lost spreadsheets, as you would if the server were in your back room.
What are the downsides to Cloud Computing?
You become dependent on your cloud providers. If there’s no easy way to extract your data in a usable format, your business success is now intertwined with theirs. There may also be legal and privacy issues: will your data become subject to the privacy and data retention laws of another country if your provider is overseas; will you still be compliant with your industry requirements in Australia? Be careful to select a Cloud Provider who will sign a legal agreement with you that verifies your data belongs to you should you ever want it back. It may also be a good idea to consider a provider in your own country (not international) who is bound by the same laws as your business, and who you can contact easily.
Is cloud computing “radically new”?
It’s not really a big change from the way things have been done for years. It’s more evolution than revolution. Cloud computing is not only the future of computing, it is the present, and the entire past of computing is all cloud.
In many ways cloud computing is indeed just the current buzzword for what has also been called utility computing, grid computing, software as a service (SaaS), IBM’s ‘On Demand’ branded services, the application service provider (ASP) model, or even good old mainframe timesharing.
Where is Australia relative to Cloud Computing?
Some big companies have committed to cloud computing, including the Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, Visy and Komatsu. The Royal Australian College of General Practice will provide GPs with cloud-based e-health applications by this time next year. Even the Department of Defence’s CIO is advocating the cloud.
Cloud computing does require solid internet links, however, and Australia’s relatively expensive broadband infrastructure may have held back adoption of Cloud Computing to this point.