On June 14th Stacy Dyer and I presented a webcast talking about “the cloud” and what It really is. This post is a follow up to help answer some of the questions asked and to provide a link to the presentation on Slideshare.
During our webcast we spent a fair amount of time discussing what is the cloud – physically. What does it look like? I found some more pictures for you below.
Here’s a drawing of what a “cloud farm” looks like and a break out picture of an individual container.
This picture is what it looks like inside one of the shipping container data center units depicted above.
We had some really good questions and it makes sense to repost them here in case you couldn’t join us.
Q. What is the security on the cloud as far as HIPAA goes?
A. Many organizations who are subject to HIPAA use a private cloud solution. It’s easier to work with auditors if you aren’t sharing the infrastructure. My recommendation is that you work with a provider that understands your security and privacy needs.
Q. If you go cloud, what else do you need internally to keep operating … email, printer, internet access …?
A. The answer depends. Email and file services are ideal for pushing up to the cloud as a service. For sharing printers, I suggest getting an “all in one” printer that sits on the network rather than getting a server to control just your print queue. Of course, you still need great internet access. Find a stable internet provider and make sure that the equipment you use to connect to the Internet is working well and configured securely and properly.
Q. What is PCI compliance?
A. Payment Card Industry (Visa / Mastercard) compliance is a set of standards that govern what you must do to process payments securely. Most customers ask about merchant certification standards that allow you to take credit cards as payments. The certification is usually a yearly self-assessment with a simple vulnerability scan run on your network to make sure the “bad guys” can’t get in. SAAS and cloud services (like Sage Exchange) that process credit cards make the process even simpler by handling the tough bits of the certification for you.
Q. Are files in the cloud accessible by smart phone?
A. Short answer – yes. It does depend on the software or service you are using.
Q. Do you need software on your remote device, for example loaded on a laptop, to access and use cloud files?
A. Not necessarily, it depends on the solution. There are solutions that mirror what file access looks like locally, but they connect to cloud storage versus your hard drive.
Q. Can non-server apps (like point-of-sale or bar-coding/scanner) connect through a VPN or other connection to a cloud app….or does it need to be 1:1 connection with the cloud?
A. It depends. Some would probably work just fine and others wouldn’t work at all. It’s important to go through the list of questions …
Q. How do you refer to things like Dropbox, Flickr that are in the cloud?
A. As cloud-based services, some are more like social media.
Q. Is a cloud server independent of the web or do all cloud servers go through the Internet?
A. The cloud exists on the standard Internet. You do not need another connection to the Internet to use the cloud.
Q. Is Sage Fundraising 50 available in the cloud?
A. Yes. You can find more information here.
Thank you to everyone who attended and if you have more questions post them in the comments below.
Grant M. Howe
VP Research and Development
Sage Nonprofit
@Geekbyte on Twitter
Reblogged this on Abhijit Kharat.