7 reasons to switch your design business to the cloud
Ivan | Mon, 2012-01-09 02:43
2012 will be the year when most businesses will finally make the move to the cloud. Email, calendars, documents and other files will all reside in the cloud on services like Google Apps.
- No need to maintain servers or hosting packages, thus everything becomes simpler and cheaper.
- No need to update software or synchronise data on different devices, therefore less time spent on tech support and more time spent on design.
- Significantly less spam, thus you not only save time with a leaner inbox you're also safer as you will get less malicious code in email.
- Collaboration with you colleagues and clients is much easier in the cloud. You can share presentations with your client and they can annotate it live.
- Most designers do a significant part of their non-design work on mobile devices, which works much better in the cloud. Tablets great work not only for presenting your work, but also to get stuff done while on the road.
- Easier upgrades and downgrades of the system according to business needs. If you have to hire new team members you can get their accounts ready in minutes.
- Less chance of losing data due to hardware failure or other disasters like fire or theft. Upload your graphics files to the cloud too, not just documents and presentations. Keep everything safe automatically with services like Insync for Google Apps, Dropbox and Carbonite.
Possible Downsides of the cloud
- It is possible the cloud is not accessible at certain times, but so far Google and other cloud services demonstrated a very reliable service.
- If there is no Internet connection, the system may stop working unless you enable offline mode in advance.
- Theoretically the data in the cloud can be compromised, but the chance of this happening is very low.
Have you already made the switch to the cloud or are you planning to? What is your experience and do you have any advice designers should be aware of?
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this whole "cloud" thing seems like another example of "just because we can. doesnt mean we should"
im not ready to trust my critical activities to something that requires net connection. movies and music MAYBE. but not critical content.
For critical content you should have a local and cloud versions synced automatically. Neither of the two alone is sufficient enough I think. Your HD can die any minute just like your internet connection. You should be able to continue to work within half an hour if such an issue arises. Am I right?
Disagree with wgzn: you should not by default. There are clear advantages of using cloud. It's not mean cloud suitable for all business. But in many cases it is.
I personally believe that sometime in the future we will be using our laptop's hdd only for caching and most of our data would be available in the cloud. Users also would be able to choose, use cloud services or not. But movement to the cloud will be continued, I think.
I agree. I think we will switch around having local backups of our primary cloud storage rather than the other way around.
I honestly don't see many fantastic reasons in your post Ivan. No disrespect, but it seems like marketing bullet points more than really solid reasons.
For example your very first point. How many small business are maintaining servers? And how exactly do you propose to help remove that costs? I have several websites, and nothing you propose will remove the costs of having those websites hosted. At most I can opt to route my email through Gmail and give Google the pleasure of combing my data for using their IMAP services. However that's not going to remove the hosting costs of my website. And no free clouded web service can give me the flexibility of having my website on a host I pay for.
Even your second point has a lot of smoke in it. "No need to update software" Really in what way? That's just plain not true
I could go on and on and pick apart this point by point, but I think you can catch my meaning. I think currently a lot of these cloud services are just hype, designed to get you dependent on something so you eventually become a paid user. Which in turn negates the entire cost savings. Sure some of these services will always be free, like those provide by Google and Apple. They will eat the cost of maintaining it, in order to keep you in their eco-system. However other small services like Dropbox are going to look to monetizing sometime in the future. Now as awesome as Dropbox is, is it really something you can't live without. As a graphic or web designer you are always going to need some web presence for your business. Should it come down to Dropbox becoming strictly a payment service might it not be a bit cheaper to just use space on your own website to let clients view revisions?
The first two points are relevant to small businesses with a couple of employees. They generally used to have mail and file servers. Maintaining and updating this server is a significant headache. I used to work for small design studios with 20-30 people and I talk from experience. So, it's not smoke it just doesn't apply to 1-2 person businesses.
Yes, you can get away not using the cloud, but once you switch and experience the overall benefits you will never never want to go back.
"but once you switch and experience the overall benefits you will never never want to go back."
but once you are working somewhere and find yourself with no net connection and cant work AT ALL. what will you do?
Most enterprise cloud software saves an offline copy of your files and re-syncs when you get a connection again. It's not a big deal.
For emails you have two options. You can IMAP all your mail to Mail.app or you can install this on your Chrome browser: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejidjjhkpiempkbhmpbfngldlkglhimk
For documents you can use similar isync or install this on your Chrome browser: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/apdfllckaahabafndbhieahigkjlhalf
Life goes without internet. And you can also keep working within a few hours if somebody steals your computer and local backups too because you have everything in the cloud.
Total non-issue for me. See no reason whatsoever to trust a company like Google with any of my information - especially personal stuff.
I'm not bashing the cloud per se because I've never used it for any period of time but is this not the same old case of old ideas/ methods/ software being replaced?
Hasn't it always been a golden rule for anything to keep backups? Granted the frequency of things such as to-do lists or calendars are very frequently modified but items such as files and invoices should be kept on several places. Depending on their importance the most security you could ask for is to diversify. On Everything. HDD, Internet, FTP, spare computer, paper, discs, externals, off site physical storage (at home, wherever). Aside from office tasks and items such as fonts, or frequented stock photography (which again debatable, could be kept off the cloud) I don't see why you'd use it (or any other method) exclusively for anything aside from the base paperwork (timesheets, blank invoices or contracts) or calendars.
Also again: in response to the base title of "Switch to the cloud".
PS: If any of you require mass amounts of cloud services away from your desk, stop doing so much work while you're not being paid. You deserve to be compensated for your efforts.
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