Monday 01 February 2010
Into the Cloud
The rise in the excitement surrounding cloud computing over the past year or so has prompted business owners to review how their data is stored. More companies are happy to send their data to a new home in the cloud, wherever that might be.
Cloud computing is rapidly gaining momentum and becoming more readily accepted by others than the IT specialists. Cloud computing service providers deliver business programmes online, while the software and all the company’s data are stored on remote servers.
In the business world usage of this technology is predicted to grow rapidly. Estimates vary but experts say that the growth in this sector will be tenfold by 2013.
The benefits to businesses are the availability of flexible and low cost IT. Cloud computing is particularly attractive to new entrants in the market as the economic difficulties of the last two years has brought its financial advantages to the fore. Business owners can see the benefits of removing the need to invest capital in on site structures.
If you go down this route you need to be happy that your data is as secure as it would be on your own premises. If outsourcing some of your data or putting into the cloud, you should go and find out what security measures the service provider has put in place.
As soon as a company’s data leaves the confines of its own IT structure, the potential is there for it to get into the wrong hands. So you need to introduce an element of the real world to gain a level of comfort and confidence that your data is secure. Just as with any outsourced service, you need to trust the people that are handling your business. At the end of the day, if data gets lost it is still your responsibility and liability.
So weigh up the financial benefits of being able to save a lot of capital expenditure in developing your own infrastructure, against the loss of your close control. Are you a worrier?
You will always reap the benefits of emerging technology and innovation if you have justifiable faith in the service providers.
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Friday 22 January 2010
SideWiki – is it Open Warfare? Asks Stuart Wilkin
There’s been a bit of a scare in the PR industry, ever since Google launched its Sidewiki technology at the end of last year. The application allows members of the public to post a comment in a browser window directly next to a brand’s website. And so marketing and PR professionals face another challenge as they strive to manage the brand reputation of their clients.
So far things have been relatively quiet, but how long before open warfare breaks out. There are some rules. The targeted website can flag illegal or abusive content using a ‘Report Abuse’ button. But other than that you can’t edit or delete users’ opinions.
Brand managers have used social media to promote their businesses, but now things are anything but one way. And subversive comments directly next to a company’s website could dilute the site’s credibility and, in the worst case, drive customers away.
There may be some amusing banter appearing next to football clubs’ websites in due course, but is this new application rendering PR agencies a little less potent? You can use it to you advantage by persuading happy customers to post warm comments.
The long term impact may be just a reminder that you always need your business to have substance behind the spinning words. If you have a good product and give your customers excellent service they’ll buy from you anyway. Concentrate on that.
And if you interact regularly with your customers, surely new and nimble threats like this will be less of a worry. After all, websites in 2010 should be about two way communication. You don’t need to be scared of people telling you what they think.
But if we all stoop to the temptation of posting comments on competitors’ websites then we will be hurtling headlong into the Wild West. And then watch the PR people run for cover!
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Tuesday 12 January 2010
It's snow joke
With this bad weather preventing access to work places accross the UK it struck me how badly prepared many businesses are for these types of situations. Many business will have had no access to their voice based communications systems when the were excluded from their offices.
Luckily for us we decided to practice what we preach & recently installed our web based IVR system on our non geographic number. Our engineers were able to "dial in" from their mobile phones & receive calls from the office number as if they were sat in the office. All this was done from the internet with no access to the office. This also gives us redundancy should our phone system or phones lines have an outage.
In a lot of cases business are using a single circuit & are relying on geographic numbers to provide voice communications into their organisation. This is a frightening prospect - despite email being the most popular form of communication voice is still hugely important and should therefore require some form of continuity.
Harry Edwards,
Managing Director
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