Ryan Holmes has never had a server fail. Not one of his, at least. That’s because his company’s data is stored elsewhere, on servers operated and maintained by a third-party provider, in a place commonly referred to as the cloud.
Mr. Holmes is the chief executive officer of Vancouver-based Web developer HootSuite Media. The company’s HootSuite Web app – accessible via browser or mobile phone – combines Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts into a unified, online hub. Friends and followers can be managed from a single account, making it one of the most popular social media services on the Web.
However, HootSuite is also the perfect example of how cloud computing is helping small businesses succeed in very big ways. Since its inception in late 2008, the company has harnessed the power of the Internet as a cheap but plentiful resource that allows applications, services and data to live on distant machines, available anywhere, any time.
And for a new generation of similar online startups the cloud’s advantages are seemingly endless.
“We're always synced. We're lightweight. We're successful everywhere, and don't require an IT department,” said Mr. Holmes. “The benefits of the cloud, in my opinion, outweigh all the other benefits of native [local] applications.”
HootSuite, for example, relies on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) technology, a scalable hosting service upon which most of the company’s infrastructure resides. During periods of heavy traffic, Amazon’s service can dynamically increase the amount of available computing power to cope with the added stress – an impossible feat with traditional in-house hardware.
This flexibility has allowed HootSuite to grow quickly and cheaply, having gained close to 2 million users in just two-and-a-half years.
“It's about buying what you need, when you need it, if you need it,” said Reuven Cohen, founder of Toronto-based cloud services provider Enomaly Inc. Similar to Amazon, the company offers infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to telecommunication companies and other clients.
Without the cloud’s ability to scale, a business would have to buy and maintain additional servers to meet peak demands – sometimes at a cost of thousands of dollars per machine. These days, not only is that inefficient and cost ineffective, Mr. Cohen remarked, but “it simply makes no sense to have a whole bunch of resources that sit unused 90 per cent of the time.”
Machines that, traditionally, would have been dedicated entirely to invoicing software or e-commerce services, for example, can be replaced with Web applications such as Freshbooks or Shopify. These services are not only cheap but easy for IT staff to maintain.
The cloud is far from foolproof, however. For almost four days in late April a portion of Amazon’s EC2 service failed, raising the question of reliability. The outage affected such popular sites as Reddit, Quora and Foursquare, and cost HootSuite almost a full business day.
In an unrelated incident, the PlayStation network, a so-called private cloud owned and operated by Sony, was hacked in a high profile attack that same week, exposing personal information and possibly credit card data to intruders.
“An application in your own data centre isn’t any safer than in a service provider's data centre,” said Matt Richards, senior director of cloud strategy and solutions at CA Technologies, a New York-based IT software company. In fact, the cloud “is where a lot of people's information is stored. So it's actually a bigger, richer target.”
If anything, the incidents at Amazon and Sony are good reminders that solid computing security and IT practices still very much apply online.
“Whether the computers are here or there, they're still vulnerable to security risks and downtime,” said Neil McEvoy, founder and president of the Cloud Best Practices Network, a non-profit group of cloud experts. “It’s not a magical technology.”
