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GreatSoftAuthor: GreatSoft
Greatsoft offers accounting software solutions, financial solutions, business intelligence tools, document management and practice management software solutions. Language: en Genres: Technology Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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GreatSoft offers Cloud Solutions
Monday, 3 September, 2012
Welcome to GreatSoft's Podcast Episode 2 on Cloud Computing. With us today, we have our senior developer, Mario Felix. Tell us about your recent projects, deploying applications to the cloud. Well, the most recent project in terms of cloud computing has been with Windows Azure. We had support from Microsoft; they invested in us to get our web application into Azure, which we did successfully. And in doing that, we realised the benefits in utilising cloud computing. We have approached some local (South African) vendors, such as RSAWEB and Cyrex to provide us with a cloud hosting platform as well. Ok, let’s get back to basics. There are so many buzzwords today in I.T., can you explain what Cloud Computing is? Well, in layman's terms, cloud computing is essentially taking what you've got on-site, your server and network infrastructures and putting them in a data centre somewhere with a third party vendor. And the benefit of that is, you don't need to have that massive investment up front in terms of hardware, and licensing and I.T. staff. What challenges do small businesses face regarding data security and bandwidth? Most small businesses don't have a dedicated I.T. team on-site; they normally use a third party vendor for their I.T. They also utilise ADSL - and in South Africa, ADSL is very fledgling technology, so in terms of reliability and availability, that's where they [small businesses] struggle the most. What cloud computing provides is that security and reliability - your software and services are sitting in the cloud somewhere utilising infrastructure from a large data centre with a huge amount of manpower in terms of I.T. staff. So, from that point of view, its more advantageous for them [small businesses] to utilise a cloud computing platform. How does this technology benefit accounting practices? The one major benefit is the upfront cost of investment for accounting practices. The next benefit is that the accounting practices can focus more on utilising their software to grow their business rather than ensuring that systems are running at 100%.
