From: Kevin Turner
Some sort of Cloud offering may help in the future, but try convincing
business owners that it is a good idea to have their software and data
held offsite somewhere, especially if their internet connectivity is less
than reliable. It is a tough sell!
Seems like everything is a tough sell these days, but I do see attitudes
changing about cloud services. I believe that they represent a growing
opportunity for IBM i to get back in the game of serving small organizations.
We recently had a Canadian company set up an office in Utah which develops and
markets a cloud solution for dental offices, which stores patient records, which
require security. They make a pitch that the records on their cloud servers are
probably more secure than local storage in distributed offices. How effective
are dental offices at securing records, really? Again this is a case where the
predominant technology in dental offices today is Windows XP workstations paired
with a Windows server. I bet there's good opportunity to swap that out, and
place iPads on a table next to the dental chair paired with a cloud offering.
Store reports locally in PDF or some other format as a backup.
One of the members of our local user's group has traditionally developed all
their systems and run them in house under IBM i, but they recently adopted a
cloud service to schedule about 5,000 part time summer workers for a family
oriented amusement park, camping, eating, etc. They figured the cloud service
provider offered a better solution than they could have developed, in house.
-Nathan
midrange.com
