Why are cloud services so hard to understand?

Do you know what an hour of small instance compute time is? Neither do I – and I am no more enlightened after reading definitions for it. The IT world is losing billions of potential sales dollars by badly pitched services.

As one of the many millions of small and medium size businesses out there I am very happy to use cloud services and software as a service (SaaS) in order to make work and life simpler. To speak for small business owners everywhere – I spend a lot of my time setting up IT and sorting out IT problems. What I crave most in life is simplicity and reliability.

Some services are easy to understand. For example I have gotten rid of the need for an email server by using Google Apps – which also allows syncing across devices. I look forward to seeing Microsoft’s solutions as they finally roll out Windows 8.

For online storage Dropbox, Sharefile and others make life pretty easy – with some limitations.

And here is where we reach some of grey areas of the world of IT that haven’t figured out how to talk to non-IT types.

Like many business owners I really appreciate the per user pricing for SaaS. However, there comes a point where I want to look at a solution for the larger number of employees I have, and hit a brick wall in terms terminology.

I would love to have a scalable cloud based server – however, I realise now that even though I have been using the word ‘server’ for most of my working career, I actually don’t understand what a server is in a technical sense.

For me, like most people, there is the H: drive which is set up on my computer so that we can all save our files into a single location, open the files, edit them, save them, and even log on from a remote location. I believe this is what is called a file server.

Rackspace explains things in a relatively straightforward manner – but prices by the user rather than GB.

Windows Azure is powerful I know, but the marketing is written for IT geeks. E.g. “Load balance any number of Web Sites across private VM instances dedicated to your apps.”  Whisky Tango Foxtrot?

Amazon isn’t much better – “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud provides the flexibility to choose from a number of different instance types to meet your computing needs. Each instance provides a predictable amount of dedicated compute capacity and is charged per instance-hour consumed.”

So, as far as I can tell, cloud services are marketed at large corporates with dedicated IT departments, startups with lots of IT savvy staff, or at personal use with massively dumbed down sales messages.

Dropbox may have a solution for Ted who’s about to travel around Africa, but it doesn’t tell me how to run my business more easily yet. I'm running a small business, not joining the Peace Corps.

Here’s my shopping list for the average small to medium size business (and remember, there are millions of us). Our defining characteristics are that we are time poor, intolerant of vapour ware, wary of non-mainstream platforms and need to be shown how something works before we trust it.

Let’s start with a shared drive (file server) based in the cloud. 

• I want a shared drive that I can use to open, edit and save documents easily. I want to set it up as an H:Drive or equivalent under Windows. If I need to sync I can just save a working copy to my C: Drive and then copy it back later. Full syncing can come later.
• I want to know that shared drive is backed up and recoverable.
• I may need to know where the data is stored in order to comply with privacy laws in my country (e.g. Google will host your data in Europe rather than the US in order to meet other countries more stringent privacy regulations).
• I need to be able to set access to those drives. For example, HR records and accounting should only be accessed by those who really need to know.
• I need to know what the up-time is and what security is for your service.
• I will get shirty if the typical maintenance time on servers at your end is convenient for US customers but affects me during working hours.
• Ability to access from mobile devices, etc. is great.
• Pricing – I am happy to pay by the user to a point. After that I would prefer to pay by the GB. Most of us aren’t multimedia intensive creative agencies who chew up massive amounts of drive space with videos and music. We mostly produce Excel, Word and Powerpoint files and after a certain level of monthly cost we start to get pissed off with your per user pricing.

Emails 

• Google Apps offers a fantastic service. Zoho and others also offer good hosted email plans.
• Outlook webaccess is good, but I hate using it compared to Gmail based solutions.
• Again, I am happy to pay based on users to a point- but then I would like pricing based on disc usage/bandwidth used.

  

Web hosting

• In case you hadn’t noticed, there is a rebellion against walled garden CMS’s. A lot of companies are moving to WordPress as their website and content management system – and there is a reason for this – it is cheaper, easier to modify and easier to update than most CMS.
• We are also sick of being told we need expensive graphic design packages, that we need to host it with the site developer at a premium, and we are particularly sick of being told we need to pay a lot of money to access our stats and put in SEO. You are using your technical skills to hold us to ransom, not enable us to be succeeding in a digital world.
• Google needs to get its act together on its own Google Sites and Blogspot services – they could, if they tried, take out a lot of website development and management. And hey, Microsoft – why aren’t you pushing the free version of your cut-down Sharepoint more aggressively and in language that I as a small business owner can understand.

And yes, there probably are some solutions out there that do some if not all of these things – but if it doesn’t come up in plain English on the home page of a large and reputable company then to me it doesn’t exist. Time to get your act together guys.