What is this Cloud Thing

As I mentioned in a previous post Office 365 was officially released this week. This is Microsoft's Cloud offering to companies. Microsoft and many other companies are investing a lot of money into this technology. The IT culture is definitely moving in this direction and it offers huge benefits to companies who take advantage of it.

The consulting company I work for has been very involved with Microsoft's cloud offering since it's previous version, BPOS. We worked hard and I'm proud to say we were the top seller for this product in our state. We migrated more companies to BPOS than any other Partner.

Office 365 is an upgrade from BPOS and we, along with the rest of the industry, have been anxiously awaiting it's arrival. It promised to be bigger, faster, and more aerodynamic than it's predecessor. It's a great product. The hosted offering offers 90-95% of the features the on-premise solution does. It's an excellent product!  Friday, June 24th, we signed up our first Office 365 customer. Proud to say we had the first signup in a 5 state region. We have several other customers ready for us to implement it for them also.

So what is this "cloud thing" and why do I think it will revolutionize the IT industry. The "cloud" simply allows a company to have their data hosted by someone else. In the case of Microsoft they host Exchange (email), Sharepoint (files and collaboration), and Live Meeting. This is big deal because it allows a company to focus on what they do, instead of worrying if their servers are working. This is especially nice for small companies who don't have an IT staff. It helps large companies too because it allows them to focus their IT resources elsewhere, whether it is hardware, software, and manpower.

I used to support the Exchange organization for a large company, 10,000 mailboxes. It sounds cool to say, but it was a lot of work. High availability, 8 servers, 75 stores, 3 TB of data, endless backups, constant maintenance, and always on call. When I started researching the hosted solution Microsoft was offering I couldn't wait to get started. I'm all in favor of letting Microsoft deal with the servers and mailboxes instead of me.

So in short, Microsoft will host email, sharepoint, and Lync in military grade, redundant data centers. That is something very few companies can afford, especially small companies. They offer high availability, with all the features, and at a cheaper price than it would cost to have the server yourself.

This technology is only going to grow and I'm looking forward to seeing where it will end up. I'm excited we are on the front edge of the technology.