You might have heard of cloud computing, SAAS (Software As A Service), in this post, we discuss the pros and cons of cloud computing and why we belive it is the way of the future.

1. Anywhere, anytime, from any device.
2. Collaborate in near real time, from anywhere.
3. Continuous data backup and better data security.
4. Up to date without the wait.

What is the deal with cloud computing?

The idea behind cloud computing is to share resources. The cloud serves as a virtual pool where computational hardware and infrastructure can be shared and accessed by multiple users concurrently. This helps to better allocate and utilise limited resources, reducing waste and wear on the system as a whole.

So why should I go on the cloud?

There are multiple advantages to using cloud based systems.

Global access

By nature, the cloud is always on and never sleeps so you can connect to it and utilise its services from anywhere in the world and at any time. The world is your office.

Team up

Cloud based systems are designed to cater for large numbers of concurrent users. This allows for endless collaboration potential in near real time without sacrificing performance. Imagine yourself and a friend in separate timezones editing an article at the same time while you see what your friend is doing, as if you were peering over their shoulder.

Data, precious data

Anyone who works frequently with data has to go through the dreaded routine of manually backing up their data onto a USB stick or a hard drive every once a week or so. This can become tedious and error prone - say you overwrite some important file with the data that you are backing up. The cloud offers solutions to this, including but not limited to automated and continuous data backup across multiple servers. This way, your data is remains intact as long as a single server remains operational, even if the majority of servers fail for whatever reason. That being said, if you still want to manually backup your data, you can do that too.

The cloud often brings up questions about security and that, as your data is on the network, it can be attacked. On this point, you are right. However, your computer at home or in the office is most likely also networked, and hence also highly susceptible to attacks. The difference here comes down to size and scale. A handful of computers owned by a single entity can be easily overpowered and any data contained within stolen or manipulated. The cloud, however, is massive. Thousands upon thousands of computers maintained and protected by thousands more people working together to keep your data safe means those who are even remotely capable of accessing your data without consent are on the scale of nations.

As for MechanicDesk, being a cloud based system ourself, we employ the services of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run and maintain our servers. They are a most reputable business and most importantly, they are secure.

Continuous development and maintenance

Another benefit of being on a cloud, from a software service provider point of view, is we are able to fix issues and update our software to meet your needs very quickly. Instead of having to wait for a disc to get delivered to you or having to download a software patch in order to affect changes, we just release new versions to the cloud. The end user uses the new version and reaps the benefits of the new version immediately. For new feature updates, this does not seem important but for technical issues, we are sure that you would rather receive the fix sooner than later.

That is all from us for now - catch you in the next blog post!