Tech trends
Small Businesses and the 'Cloud': What's Ahead?

Cloud computing stands out as one of 2009's most talked about technologies. Indeed, it was hard to miss the multitude of articles conferences, and webinars on the subject. But do SMBs care about the cloud? If you consult market research reports, smaller firms are either hesitant to adopt the technology or flocking to the cloud.

"Cloud computing adoption is lagging," noted a Forrester Research survey published in December. The report noted that 4 percent of the SMB respondents have implemented pay-per-use hosting of virtual servers. Fifty-one percent of the SMBs identified security concerns as their main reasons for remaining on the sidelines.

But a survey conducted by Spiceworks Inc. earlier this year reported that 57 percent of SMBs use one or more cloud computing services.

Different Definitions
So are SMBs on the cloud or not? The answer depends on how the cloud is defined. In general, the cloud concept describes the provisioning of computing resources through the Internet -- the "cloud." Instead of purchasing and installing physical hardware, networking, storage and software products, customers purchase those items as a service that can be scaled up and down as needed.

But the cloud can be separated into layers and this is how SMBs can be simultaneously participating and not participating. The base layer focuses on infrastructure and is sometimes referred to as infrastructure as a service (IaaS). IaaS encompasses the pay-as-you go virtual server approach cited in the Forrester report. Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud provides one example of IaaS.

A middle layer involves tools and middleware for managing cloud environments and providing user portals and security services among other features.

But what seems to be generating the greatest interest among SMBs is the application layer riding atop the cloud. Applications delivered over the internet, software as a service, range from customer relationship management (salesforce.com http://www.salesforce.com/) to sales forecasting (Lokad http://www.lokad.com/).

According to the Spiceworks survey, SMBs' most popular cloud services are anti-spam (43 percent) and hosted e-mail (25 percent) applications. Online backup placed third at 20 percent.

What's Ahead?
In 2010, SMBs cloud adoption will probably continue the pattern Spiceworks detected. Smaller companies seem more likely to consume the cloud as applications or supporting services such as storage -- as opposed to chunks of IT infrastructure. Organizations looking to offload the management hassle of running Exchange in-house or managing backup may turn to a cloud-based offering.

Another area worth watching: remote tech support. SupportSpace http://www.supportspace.com/ uses SaaS technology to manage and deliver remote services to consumers and SMBs. The company's service menu includes virus removal, PC tune-ups, and wireless network assistance. Similarly, iyogi offers remote support to home users and small businesses.

A recent CDW survey of small business owners found that fewer than half of the respondents were optimistic about their growth potential over the next five years. That mood is reflected in small business hiring plans, or the lack thereof. Earlier this month, George S. May International, a management consulting firm, reported that 74 percent of the small businesses it polled had no immediate plan to boost headcount. Of that group, 62 percent of the survey respondents said they had "no confidence in the economy sustaining the need for more employees."

Smaller companies continue to feel economic pain. But a surprising number of them fail to protect themselves from situations that could inflict further damage. Backup provides a particularly glaring example. The same CDW small business report discovered that 73 percent of the firms with computing networks possess neither onsite nor offsite data backup.

Companies that fail to backup data are riding their luck. A severe data loss can wipeout a company in the best of times. Backup should take its place alongside IT security as a key component of any company's data protection plan.

Getting Started
And as with IT security, a good place to start a data backup strategy is assessing what you have and where it's located. Where does a company's customer, transaction and financial data reside? Is it all on a server or does critical data also reside on PCs and mobile computing devices?

Company leaders must also weigh the importance of different types of data. The value of data will help shape the backup schedule and approach. A nightly backup may adequate for many organizations, but some firms may not want to potentially risk losing a day's worth of data -- in those cases more frequent backups are in order. In storage-speak, the backup period an organization finds acceptable is termed the recovery point objective.

The recovery time objective, meanwhile, deals with how quickly a company seeks to have data restored. The desired timeframe will drive the backup media selection. The need to recover rapidly, for example, will probably dictate a disk-based solution, which offers faster recovery time than tape storage. However, tape storage, still cheaper than disk, may prove the better choice for infrequently accessed data.

Backup Layers
Onsite backup can be fairly straightforward. Backup software for PCs abounds. Such products let users select what they want to backup, where the backups will occur -- on an external hard drive or CD, for example -- and how frequently they will take place. Small businesses with servers to backup might consider investing in a a network-attached storage (NAS) device.

The backup job doesn't end with the on-premise gear, however. A fire or other disaster can foil the best conceived on-site plan, so companies need to consider an off-site approach. Off-site tape is one way to go. Such a scenario might involve backing up a NAS device to a tape library and sending the tape cartridges to an outside facility for safekeeping.

With storage moving into the cloud, online backup provides another take on off-site storage. Venyu's AmeriVault online backup service and Mozy.com are among the options a small business can tap.

For further reading on backup, SNIA, a storage industry association, has a selection of storage publications including one on choosing a backup solution: http://www.snia.org/forums/dmf/news/articles/0710IS_FORE.PDF