Jon Biedermann's DonorPerfect Blog

Cloud computing, as I define it, is the ability for organizations to rent computer time and space from the "cloud computing" services such as those from Amazon and Google. It is generally viewed as an alternative to either hosting your own infrastructure yourself, or outsourcing your infrastructure but managing it yourself (in essence, a private "cloud").

Here at DonorPerfect, we employ the private cloud strategy, because we feel that we are experts in software management, but not hardware. As such, we manage the software, and rely on expertise from our hardware infrastructure service provider, Peer1. Together, we deliver our solution as "Software as a Service", or SaaS, which is one of the techno-buzzword-bingo words you'll find today in our industry.

But are we going far enough??? There's even more buzz in the industry that one shouldn't have to rely on physical servers at all, and place all of the software and data in "the cloud". This way, you only pay for what you need, like water or electricity, and you never have to worry about pesky hardware or software updates, and you experience 100% uptime.

Or do you?

Lately, there's been some problems with this idea, including security concerns and outages, so once again, a new technology may not be all what it's cracked up to be.

Not all new technologies pan out. Time will tell if cloud computing is one of them.

• Cloud Computing: Automation's Great - But I Trust Humans More