Whether you like it or not, Cloud computing is here to stay. For many businesses, both big and small, it is making us all more connected and improving office procedures and upping our collective productivity. Whilst the early days of cloud computing may have been all about security, the latest vibe is how it is pushing business forward and, in the process, saving a good deal of money on IT support.

There’s no doubt that this growth has been supported by our increasing use of a number of portable devices such as smartphones and tablets. That means your cloud desktop is now a thing that operates on the move, travelling with you across the world, keeping you in contact with the office, business associates, and consumers whether it’s at home in Brighton or 5am in Beijing.

In short, we are no longer tied to one PC at a desk but can network and develop and collaborate anytime and anywhere we wish. For those of you who remember the humble floppy disk, we’ve come a long way in the last twenty years or so. Cloud hosting has grown for both consumers and businesses and, for many of us, has become part of our daily online lives – we save photos, post messages, swap data and provide solutions at much greater speed than we ever have before.

Benefits of a Cloud Service for SMEs

For small and medium sized businesses, having a cloud desktop is one of the most practical operational decisions that can be taken. It’s cheaper and more flexible than investing in onsite hardware without the capital expenditure and therefore a more eco-friendly way of operating. Disaster management, an important component for many businesses nowadays, is also taken care of because all data is held safely away from the business which means it can be easily recovered if something terrible happens to the office environment or equipment such as mobile phones.

The rise in cloud subscription platforms also gives many businesses access to feature rich products that would be more costly if they were installed separately. That means employees can have access to a wide variety of software for just a set monthly fee that doesn’t break the bank and can be adjusted depending on individual needs. Finally, one of the main advantages of a cloud desktop is that it allows for a greater degree of collaboration with users able to work with each other whilst outside the office.

With the enhanced security that comes with cloud services nowadays, SMEs get all the power they need from their operating platform at a fraction of what it would cost them back in the old days.

Moving to a system like the M2 Cloud gives businesses all the flexibility and security, as well as useful tools such as Microsoft Office 365, which dramatically improves connectivity and productivity. Provisions can be tailored to individual businesses which means they don’t end up with programs that have little operational value and only pay for what they really need.

Today it’s easy to forget what that world was like:

A single server handled a single workload. Outside mainframe and certain proprietary systems, the way organizations utilized servers was very much a 1:1 relationship, and the average X86 server was running at 15% CPU utilization.
Nearly every new project required standing up a new server.  Servers often had to be purchased, Ops had to perform a physical implementation, the network team had to provide connectivity, the server team had to load and patch the O/S, DBA’s had set up the databases and the application owners had to load and patch the applications.
If the application outgrew the server, or migration to a new platform was desired, the above process had to be repeated…again and again.
Ten years later, most IT Organizations have virtualized 70-90% of their server environments, with the following benefits. Consider the functionality we now take for granted:

A single physical server can handle any number of virtual workloads and CPU utilization can reach 80% or greater.
Provisioning of a new server can be automated and/or self-service can be provided to end-users.  A new server can be brought online almost instantaneously.
Servers can be easily moved from platform to platform, location to location, or location to cloud
Progress followed a similar arc on the network side, where nimble and efficient virtual networking has replaced the prior generation of (literally) hard-wired and brittle infrastructure.

Having transformed the way we consume compute and network bandwidth, we remain limited by enterprise data bound to physical infrastructure.  As we look to develop applications faster, create new SLA’s and utilize cloud services, this gap between applications and data grows larger.

Consider the parallels:

A copy of data is typically required for each use case.  It is common for organizations to have separate copies for backup, snapshot, remote replication, dev, test, QA, analytics, etc.  20+ copies of data is not unusual in large organizations.
Nearly every new project requires provisioning another copy of data.  Storage often has to be purchased, Ops has to perform a physical implementation, the storage team has to provision capacity and make the copies, the network team has to provide connectivity, the server team has to build the file system and DBA’s have to scrub/mask the data.
The tools for making copies today are storage vendor specific.  Data cannot be copied easily from platform to platform.  Moving data between disparate platforms or to the cloud is largely a manual, labor-intensive process.
Copy Data Virtualization addresses the fact that these problems can’t be solved at the storage layer.  They must be solved at the application layer, with a platform that can communicate with any storage system.  Actifio Copy Data Virtualization provides such a platform… an application-centric and infrastructure-agnostic solution that changes everything, in ways parallel to its peers in compute and networking:

A single physical copy of source data can be used to create an unlimited (subject to i/o requirements) number of virtual read/write capable copies.
Provisioning new copies of data can be fully automated via customer-defined workflows, and end users can make instantaneous self-service copies.
Data can be moved from platform to platform, location to location or location to cloud.  Data can be accessed anywhere.
Much has been said about the revolutionary nature of Actifio, and it’s true that we’re a highly disruptive technology. Where the established storage vendors birthed a generation of data management that was infrastructure-centric and application-agnostic, Actifio is just the opposite… an approach that drives everything down from the application SLA, and treats the storage hardware as a commodity.

In another sense, though, we’re just the logical next step in a shift toward virtualized technology that’s been underway for a while now. Some people seem to understand us more clearly in that light, and that’s just fine by us.