Cloud computing is exposed to a lot of holes

In recent years, some large enterprises have begun to rely on Third-party-managed services to achieve the transfer of information technology infrastructure in order to save costs. Small businesses, especially start-ups, rely on cloud computing services to cut their initial spending and help them focus on core services and products.

Last August, Oliver Friedrichs, chief executive of antivirus software company Immunet, said after launching his first product that large enterprises typically use infrastructure, such as EC2 (Flexible computing cloud), as a service product, to provide resources for their research and development teams. Start-ups are cancelling large data-center investments in the first, meaning start-ups can cut back on a lot of seed money and keep a low rate of burning money. Small Business using cloud computing services is a big win because you're really saving a lot of money and avoiding a lot of upfront investment. Five years ago, we should have built a large data center, but this cost makes it difficult for us to start our business.

Instead of having its own data center, Immunet uses Amazon's EC2 service to analyze the characteristics of malware code to help its products immunet protect identify viruses and trojans. The company also uses cloud computing services to provide antivirus services to its 125,000 users and adds new virtual servers as users grow.

The cost-savings and scalability of infrastructure, a service product, are well known advantages. However, there are other advantages. In the interview, three small companies using cloud computing services and a small company that did not use cloud computing introduced lessons learned as they grew up with the cloud computing infrastructure.

1. From IT management to software development

Abandoning the data center immediately saves small and medium-sized enterprises significant costs: Server Administrators and Data center administrators. As a result, many companies are not reducing the total number of employees, but are investing the savings in budget to software developers who have experience with cloud computing.

' In traditional data centers, we need an IT staff to configure systems to racks, maintain servers, and have this hardware, ' says Friedrichs of Immunet Corp. And we don't need to hire any of those people right now, we have software developers who can write code on a very flexible platform that Amazon maintains.

For sales forecasting and analysis company RIGHT90, the cost savings of transferring its infrastructure to cloud computing are also an important advantage. Right90 did not start its own business with a third-party infrastructure. But the cost-saving and flexibility of cloud computing services is attractive. Last year, the company moved out of its data centers in Calgary, Ontario, and San Francisco, Calif., using Amazon's EC2 services and backing up servers in the company's offices. RIGHT90 chief executive Arthur Wong says there are no servers to manage to liberate the Right90 it team.

He says it operators are still doing more strategic things with the company than managing data centers and servers.