How small businesses should be using the cloud

Charlotte Harper said :

Holden Caulfield said :

Is this a paid piece?

Hi Holden, yes it is. It has included the “sponsored content” tag all along but we did on this occasion forget to include the line at the end that we are now adding to all paid content. I have just added it in. Sorry about that.

No problems. Thank you for the clarification.

wildturkeycanoe said :

From a business point of view, sure there are savings by not having to install equipment on site, but if the data is stored overseas in a foreign data centre, how can you know your data is safe? Do you even know where it is stored? It would only take a government coup, a devious competitor or system wide crash to lose all that data or have it released to unknown persons. For tax purposes, you need to have this information . If it goes missing on the Cloud, where is your backup? For this reason alone, you would need to have the information saved to a local machine or device, so the cost savings of having your business use the cloud just became negligible due to the need for a secure backup locally.
Not being able to run your business without internet available is another big risk. If Telstra, Optus or any of the big internet suppliers has a hiccup, your business falls on its face. Without the net you are back to the dark ages and will cease to trade. It hasn’t been unusual for the internet to crash for days or even weeks. Can your business cope with that if all its data is only accessible via the internet?
Just as the Clinton email scandal has rocked the world with its impact, how safe is a business’ emails and data when it is all out there waiting for somebody to hack it and then find the right bidder to purchase it?

And yet Businesses use emails all the time which most of the time contains sensitive information. There is of course always going to be that concern but does that mean everyone has stopped using e-mails.
Using the internet itself is a huge risk because of the number of viruses you could be introduced to. However that is not stopping anyone from not doing so.
We take preventative measures. Hence you can’t keep talking about a potential hacking that may or may not happen?

From a business point of view, sure there are savings by not having to install equipment on site, but if the data is stored overseas in a foreign data centre, how can you know your data is safe? Do you even know where it is stored? It would only take a government coup, a devious competitor or system wide crash to lose all that data or have it released to unknown persons. For tax purposes, you need to have this information . If it goes missing on the Cloud, where is your backup? For this reason alone, you would need to have the information saved to a local machine or device, so the cost savings of having your business use the cloud just became negligible due to the need for a secure backup locally.
Not being able to run your business without internet available is another big risk. If Telstra, Optus or any of the big internet suppliers has a hiccup, your business falls on its face. Without the net you are back to the dark ages and will cease to trade. It hasn’t been unusual for the internet to crash for days or even weeks. Can your business cope with that if all its data is only accessible via the internet?
Just as the Clinton email scandal has rocked the world with its impact, how safe is a business’ emails and data when it is all out there waiting for somebody to hack it and then find the right bidder to purchase it?

Holden Caulfield said :

Is this a paid piece?

Hi Holden, yes it is. It has included the “sponsored content” tag all along but we did on this occasion forget to include the line at the end that we are now adding to all paid content. I have just added it in. Sorry about that.

To work in the cloud, one must have internet access, in enough quantity, to be able to upload and download one’s own data.

This is a decision to be made in the context of each business. As someone who looks at business processes (and a whole bunch of stuff that goes around them), I know that adding additional interactions (connecting through the internet to someone else’s storage) introduces additional risks or costs that have to be managed.

I don’t know what Gonski funds or doesn’t fund. I do know Canberra is well-off and the vast majority of Canberra parents can afford and I think would wish to purchase quality educational items for their own kids, whether attending public or private schools, without expecting taxpayer funding for everything.

Afterall, if we can afford overseas holidays, new cars, a fancy bike, upgraded mobile phones and regular snacks of smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grained toast etc, then we can afford a simple and relatively cheap device for our kids to use at school and for their homework. The problem with Chromebooks is not affordability. It is availability.

Is this a paid piece?

dungfungus said :

Acton said :

wildturkeycanoe said :

I do not like this move to cloud computing at all.

I was/am also very dubious about cloud services and had the same thoughts and suspicions. However, on reflection I am going to give this a go and last night ordered a Chromebook from the US. What is a Chromebook you ask?

A Chromebook is a notebook which comes with Google’s Chrome OS operating system instead of Windows or Mac OS X. Chromebooks generally come with either 16 or 32 GB of internal storage, which helps keep prices low while still providing very fast drives. Chrome OS is designed to work with cloud services and Google assumes that you’ll be storing all of your documents, photos, and files on Google Drive instead of on your Chromebook’s internal drive.

Chromebooks are now being recommended by ACT government schools. See for example:

http://www.adhs.act.edu.au/i?ct@adhs/which_device_do_i_need

Here is the message (in part) circulated to all parents this week by a Canberra government primary school:

“We understand that many parents and carers of year 4 and 5 students are eager to be organised and make a device purchase for their child in preparation for the 2017 school year. As we are a government agency, we cannot recommend a particular retailer or provider of specific devices. As mentioned earlier, our preferred device is a Chromebook, however, Chromebooks are not readily available through retail stores as they are relatively cheap and do not provide any significant profit margin for them. The best options for purchasing Chromebooks are online.”

It is disappointing that major Australian retailers like Harvey Norman, JB HiFi, Good Guys, Domayne etc are letting Australian parents down by failing to stock Chromebooks. They seem unaware of, or unconcerned about the need for kids to now use Chromebooks at school. Or perhaps they are not stocking Chromebooks so as to maintain their Windows 10/Mac market. So much for corporate support of education.

Won’t Gonski fund this?

I haven’t got a cheque from Kevin 07 for the laptop my child was supposed to get for school yet, but they still keep promising to give them to the kids. There aren’t enough school units to go around in class so my son had to borrow my wife’s work laptop so he can do his school work in class [thanks to his tablet screen goin’ on the blink, again]. It gets expensive when you consider you also have to provide them with data at home to do their studies, a lot of which seem to depend on watching Youtube videos. That and antivirus software does eat into the household budget. Not to mention the cost of purchasing the gear in the first place, of which there are so many choices with different reviews. No standard guide from school, just some “helpful” hints on the specs to get by on.

Acton said :

wildturkeycanoe said :

I do not like this move to cloud computing at all.

I was/am also very dubious about cloud services and had the same thoughts and suspicions. However, on reflection I am going to give this a go and last night ordered a Chromebook from the US. What is a Chromebook you ask?

A Chromebook is a notebook which comes with Google’s Chrome OS operating system instead of Windows or Mac OS X. Chromebooks generally come with either 16 or 32 GB of internal storage, which helps keep prices low while still providing very fast drives. Chrome OS is designed to work with cloud services and Google assumes that you’ll be storing all of your documents, photos, and files on Google Drive instead of on your Chromebook’s internal drive.

Chromebooks are now being recommended by ACT government schools. See for example:

http://www.adhs.act.edu.au/i?ct@adhs/which_device_do_i_need

Here is the message (in part) circulated to all parents this week by a Canberra government primary school:

“We understand that many parents and carers of year 4 and 5 students are eager to be organised and make a device purchase for their child in preparation for the 2017 school year. As we are a government agency, we cannot recommend a particular retailer or provider of specific devices. As mentioned earlier, our preferred device is a Chromebook, however, Chromebooks are not readily available through retail stores as they are relatively cheap and do not provide any significant profit margin for them. The best options for purchasing Chromebooks are online.”

It is disappointing that major Australian retailers like Harvey Norman, JB HiFi, Good Guys, Domayne etc are letting Australian parents down by failing to stock Chromebooks. They seem unaware of, or unconcerned about the need for kids to now use Chromebooks at school. Or perhaps they are not stocking Chromebooks so as to maintain their Windows 10/Mac market. So much for corporate support of education.

Won’t Gonski fund this?

wildturkeycanoe said :

I do not like this move to cloud computing at all.

I was/am also very dubious about cloud services and had the same thoughts and suspicions. However, on reflection I am going to give this a go and last night ordered a Chromebook from the US. What is a Chromebook you ask?

A Chromebook is a notebook which comes with Google’s Chrome OS operating system instead of Windows or Mac OS X. Chromebooks generally come with either 16 or 32 GB of internal storage, which helps keep prices low while still providing very fast drives. Chrome OS is designed to work with cloud services and Google assumes that you’ll be storing all of your documents, photos, and files on Google Drive instead of on your Chromebook’s internal drive.

Chromebooks are now being recommended by ACT government schools. See for example:

http://www.adhs.act.edu.au/i?ct@adhs/which_device_do_i_need

Here is the message (in part) circulated to all parents this week by a Canberra government primary school:

“We understand that many parents and carers of year 4 and 5 students are eager to be organised and make a device purchase for their child in preparation for the 2017 school year. As we are a government agency, we cannot recommend a particular retailer or provider of specific devices. As mentioned earlier, our preferred device is a Chromebook, however, Chromebooks are not readily available through retail stores as they are relatively cheap and do not provide any significant profit margin for them. The best options for purchasing Chromebooks are online.”

It is disappointing that major Australian retailers like Harvey Norman, JB HiFi, Good Guys, Domayne etc are letting Australian parents down by failing to stock Chromebooks. They seem unaware of, or unconcerned about the need for kids to now use Chromebooks at school. Or perhaps they are not stocking Chromebooks so as to maintain their Windows 10/Mac market. So much for corporate support of education.