What would faster internet access mean to your business?

We are hearing a lot about the Ultra-Fast Broadband work that is going on around the country, and there is a lot of excitement about what it will mean for the average Kiwi business. However, when the conversation digs a little deeper we find that whilst most business owners believe the new high-speed networks will benefit them, there is little or no clarity about how.

If you consider what you use the internet for today, then making it faster would be convenient but not necessarily worth spending more money on. So let’s look at what benefits the high-speed networks will enable for businesses to make it worth-while; saving money, creating efficiencies in the business that drive growth, and removing risk.

Here at theCloud we are working on next generation services that will leverage the high-speed Ultra-Fast Broadband networks; we also already have a range of services that can give your business some of those benefits today. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is when you get server hardware and enterprise class services delivered over the internet as a monthly service rather than it being a capital investment activity.

So how does Infrastructure as a Service provide the benefits that will make high-speed network access a must have?

Saving Money – Virtual Servers on theCloud are very competitively priced, taking advantage of vast economies of scale, with a much lower overall cost if you consider the total cost of ownership when operating hardware onsite in your own business.

Creating Efficiencies – Deploying Servers on theCloud, anytime night or day, takes less than five minutes and means you are up and running when you need to be rather than waiting for hardware to arrive and time spent setting it up. Operational efficiencies are also created since theCloud support staff take care of all aspects of keeping your server online, including maintenance, security and the backup and restore of data.

Removing Risk – The typical scenario for a small business is that a single server will house all files and applications for the business and in some cases the email system too.

The decision to buy a single server would have been one of scale and cost, but this presents a number of issues:

• The server will last several years so you need to spend more today to get the performance and capacity you might need later.
• If the server fails, the down-time can be measured in days as you wait to have the server fixed or replaced. If the data is lost you then become reliant on the backups that may or may not have been successful in the last week.
• In three years when the warranty expires, you will need to undertake a fairly painful and costly transition to new hardware, and repeat this each cycle.

When you deploy a server on theCloud you instantly get the following benefits that mitigate the risks described above:

• The ability to add CPU, RAM and Hard Drive space as required so you only pay for the capacity and performance you need when you need it.
• Fault-tolerant storage and processing. All of theCloud Infrastructure Platforms are built using industry leading technologies with inherent fault-tolerance. Meaning if the physical host underneath fails, theCloud will simply reboot your server on another physical host, with no loss of data.
• Even hardware on theCloud has to be replaced every three years, but because we can move your server to another host while it is still running (you won’t notice anything) we can remove and replace our hardware without any down-time for customers.

If you would like to know more about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or any of the exciting plans theCloud has for the Ultra-Fast Broadband networks in the future, get in touch today!

www.theCloud.net.nz

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