In a Nutshell.....

Leading Edge Technology offer a range of IT & Telephony services for businesses throughout the UK & Europe. These include;

Alongside all the services above, we also offer remote support, PAYG, or why not block book hours of pre-paid support time? It's like having your own IT Manager - great!

 

 

Cloud Computing - What exactly does it mean?

Cloud this, Cloud that, it's all above us, it's the future! It's going to save us money, time, make us more productive whilst making things easier, slicker, and faster! But what is it?

Cloud computing quite simply, is service delivery of an application, service or task, over the Internet via typically a web browser. You're already using Cloud. If you have Google or Hotmail for example, there's an example of a 'Cloud service' as opposed to say, using a desktop application like Outlook to retrieve your mails into a local application sitting on your PC.

With Cloud computing in this example, you don't have to worry about the licensing costs for Outlook, you don't even need to worry about installing it on your computer, you simply retrieve your mail, by logging in online.

This is a very simplified example, but forms the fundamentals of cloud computing at its very heart. A recent online report suggests a "quarter of large US enterprises expect at least a third of their infrastructure to switch to cloud computing in the next twelve months" Dont think this is any different in the UK either, we are already moving IT technology into the cloud. Its all split into several main areas including (but not exhaustivley)

  • Software as a Service (SaaS): Applications are hosted within The Internet Group’s own infrastructure and made available to users within your organisation through the web. Anything from customer relationship management to email can be hosted and used via the SaaS model.
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS): This provides a development and hosting environment where software, databases and other critical architecture can be stored.
  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Administrators and developers use this model to roll out the resources needed to run operating systems and applications.

If you have servers in a room in your office, more likely than not, these can be collected, removed, and put into a data centre offsite, which is in effect ' the cloud '. The benefits of this include;

- Lower Total cost of Ownership - no kit costs, insurance, IT staff

- Secure - no worry of theft or disaster such as flooding or fire.

Almost everything can be put into the cloud, your Sage installation, your accounting & Operational CRM, your web development environments, anything you do with a local server, can most likely be put into the cloud. It's well worth looking into, and Leading Edge can show you the way!