Whats the Cloud

There is  a lot of talk about  "the cloud" or "cloud computing" these days. What are people talking about?

You are probably already using cloud computing!

"I am???" You say.

Yup. Cloud computing is the concept that you have every piece of your data at your finger tips wherever you are in the world and on whatever device you are using.

Instead of having documents on your computer at work or at home or laptop, the data sits on the internet ("cloud") and you can access the documents at any or all of those machines- usually simultaneously.

While you make changes to a document "on the  cloud" on one machine, those changes will show up on any other device that the document is open on. What is really cool, is that you can actually see those changes occurring on every machine simultaneously!

I see three advantages to using Cloud computing:

1. You can access it anywhere, anytime. You do not need to have a certain computer or drive. Volunteers or employees can access documents anywhere at anytime.
2. It is protected- your data is backed up on multiple computers across the world and protected from hackers and viruses
3. You can share data with whoever you choose. Those people can access information and even add to the information:

There are many companies that can create cloud computing opportunities for you but there are already off the shelf cloud based tools you can use now including

• Web Mail eg Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo

• Google Docs allow you to easily share your office documents with every team member. Anyone can make changes to these documents at the same time.  At People First -Total Solutions, we have all of our key team documents on Google docs. it can be really cool in a team meeting to watch everyone correcting a document. This method also means you always have the latest version of a document. If someone makes a mistake, like one of our staff did, when she deleted three columns of data, Google docs tells you who made the change and allows you to roll back

• Accounting- we use Xero which allows us to track our finances and accounting anywhere. Team members can jump in and enter their expense claims directly into the data base from anywhere

Cloud computing is a very cool tool more organisations could take advantage of.