Comments on: Small business: A cloud-computing opportunity?

Rackspace's recent survey tells us that less than a third of small businesses have heard of "cloud hosting." It's not their fault; no one thought to tell them about it.

[gevaperry]

They probably would have received very different responses if they avoided the term "cloud hosting" and just said "a hosting service that allows you to pay based on your usage" or something of that sort.

[bonesbautista]

My barrier to cloud hosting - no single solution exists at a reasonable price.

I'm looking specifically at cloud hosting of future services, and leaning toward an Exchange-type service in part due to Sharepoint-type document sharing. Too many of these cloud service providers do not offer the domain email/fiie hosting/document sharing/calendaring in one place with secure servers based in the country I live in (I'm in the US, but if I lived in any other country I'd want services available in that country).

I'm really tired of trying to crib together a services package with constant uptime. I'm just about ready to give up and just get a co-located box at a local hosted provider with redundant power supplies and network pipes for a monthly fee. The additional cost of setting up my own server is looking like I'll save tens of thousands in therapy costs down the road...

[dhdeans]

You said "providers have done a terrible job of marketing to that segment" -- the same was true with the managed services model overall. But, things change, in time
http://business-technology-roundtable.blogspot.com/2009/02/managed-security-services-growing-among.html

[billsorenson]

One thing that does work is using a company that has enough infrastructure so that downtime is extremely rare. In reality, small businesses have so much downtime with local servers, PCs, etc. that moving the applications to the cloud makes total sense.

We've been doing "cloud computing" via Terminal server desktops for 8 years with our customers rarely having issues. By building and controling the environment, having great redundancy, and providing great service, it works. Doesn't have to be all web apps, that's for sure. And, if you pick the right service, you have someone on the other end of the phone that can help. Gotta love that.

Cloud Computing / Cloud Hosting, etc. are just new terms and marketing spin. It's great to get the visibility of these services and a complete variable IT cost model is wonderful, it's just not all that new...

www.IVDesk.com, it does work.

[andypaynton]

Are we talking about small IT businesses or small businesses in general.
There is a yawning gap in the market for someone to market a package including infrastructure (data connection, virtual pc, storage and server resources), generic SAAS business apps (office tools, email, time management, finance/payroll, stock taking, CAD, website etc) and services (support, training, web-site development ).
Non-IT small business really don't want to think about DR, security or other aspects of systems managemen, they just want to have tools that enable them to concentrate on their business.
Get those businesses as customers when they are small and they will stay with you for ever if the services offered are scalable, application migration is made easy and customer service is good.
Small businesses will grow into medium and large ones without ever having an IT department.
Is anyone offering this?