Working in the cloud
May 29 2008
We are told that soon, entrepreneurs will have no need for permanent office space. Yet working remotely has yet to become a reality for most firms. So what truth is there among all the hype? SmallBuiness.co.uk gets to the heart of the matter.
It’s become a cliché that eventually the internet will become so part of our everyday lives that we will stop thinking about it as a discrete entity.
Key to that conceptual shift is the notion of cloud computing, which in its most radical form involves all data, computer applications and even processing power residing in large data centres rather than on individual computers.
Zvi Schreiber is CEO and co-founder of G.ho.st, whose mission is to provide ‘a free virtual computer for every human being’.
A virtual computer, unlike a physical one, can be accessed from any machine. Its entire operating system, along with all its data and applications, is located in the “cloud” – or to be more prosaic, in a datacentre whose exact location is unimportant to the user.
‘I think, ultimately, all data will be in the cloud, for two reasons,’ says Schreiber. ‘First, it will be available from everywhere, and second, it will be professionally managed, backed up and secured.’
Early doors
While cloud computing technology is still at an early phase there are companies have already commercialised elements of it.
Huddle has 1,000 clients and has been generating revenues from launch, claims CEO Alastair Mitchell. The company provides online workspaces so that people working on a project can share information and access documents simultaneously from anywhere.
‘The second part of what we do, which is the important bit, is we link up all these work spaces into a network,’ Mitchell explains.
‘You can work on several projects and manage them all from one place.’
Rather than having to access a network from a fixed location, namely an office in which your company is based, you and your employees would be able to work from home, accessing documents and data from any location in the world.
The internet has already changed the way we work and with the potential to save on office space costs, cloud computing could spell the future for business owners.
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