April is normally associated with rain so I’m having a bit of a cloudy1 month. Other than the services we host ourselves in our own private cloud Timico uses three main external cloud based services: ServiceNow, Salesforce.com and OneSource. I guess we also access tools on remote portals for BT Wholesale and Openreach which could at a push be categorised as “cloud” based services. I also personally use Eventbrite when I organise industry bashes such as the trefor.net Xmas party and my industry dinner debates.
Trefor.net also uses the whole suite of Google services and in order of level of use I also have Microsoft/Skydrive and Dropbox accounts. I also have an Apple ID but it doesn’t get used much.
I tend to mix work and play – I only have one laptop which gets used for both.
What I am interested in though is how you, dear reader, use the cloud for work. Are you on Google Apps or Office365? What other cloud services do you use and what is your experience of using them. Do you have problems with outages? How do you get around these problems?
Have you taken the plunge and gone totally cloud based? What size of business are you? My impressions are that it is easy for small businesses to go into the cloud and for very large companies the business case is compelling but not so easy for those in the middle. Is this right? Does the global nature of the cloud give you a problem in your line of business?
Answers either on a postcard stating point of view or by leaving a comment.
atb
Tref
1 Of course it’s not meant to be bloomin’ freezing but I’m sorry I have no control over that – if any of you do then for goodness sake get on and sort it 🙂
4 replies on “Which cloud services do you use for work?”
It seems Timico are using some big enterprise cloud names like ‘The Enterprise IT Cloud Company’ – ServiceNow’s (are they on the Starship???). Assuming you are using these services to support your vast network and customers, does it remove the headache of worrying about ‘is the box that runs tickets and network monitoring working’ in an internal / network / server /downtime, or does it add to the concern, that you’re out of control??
The key to all cloud services is understanding the Service Level Agreement, and how the provider will aim to resolve – if its their issue (connectivity they cant be accountable for surly?) Accept that things do go down sometimes – but its all about the recovery to an accepted service level
So i use free google apps, but i dont moan when google drive goes down like it did the other month – if it keeps messing up i may switch service, but at the end of the day its free! If i were paying for the service, I may have expected a service credit, depending on the agreement I accepted when agreeing to pay for the service – all in the small print – the bigger the company buying the service, the better chance you might have in changing the small print of the service –
You get what you pay for and you calculate the risks
That’s a very fair point Hugo – I’m going to look up what our SLAs & experiences are with ServiceNow which is the only “critical” service amongst that lot.
Should be easy to do with ServiceNow, I see one of its selling points is contract SLA management. Would make a good blog post for a comparison between your cloud providers performance against SLA, possibly BT vs SLA (and even your own SLAs !)?
Also would be interesting to understand how supplier SLAs influence business continuity planning, is being over contingent a sign of lack of trust in a supplier SLA or historic poor performance, or is it all good continuity practice?
I’m a one man show working from home, but I have a separate laptop that I use almost exclusively “for work.” I run a combination of Dropbox and Google Drive, mostly google. But when I do save something locally, that is saved in Dropbox which also syncs with my family PC, which is backed up via carbonite as well as local backup. So basically I backup 2 PCs at once. So I guess you could say I’m somewhat cloud dependent, but with a healthy dose of local redundancy.