The phrases ‘Cloud Computing’, ‘Utility Computing’ and ‘Software as a Service’ have been in the media for the past few years.

They are fairly interchangeable and what they are refer to is akin to a return to the mainframe days of yesteryear; rather than a dedicated server for each application at each location, centralised services are provided that the client can subscribe to based on usage, performance and capacity. This allows for a client to grow their computing power as their need grows, just paying for what they’re really using. Until recently, most enterprises would purchase a server for each application they needed to use, typically sizing it for their predicted 5-year growth requirements. In doing so, they were paying for power, capacity and cooling on resources that they were not using.

In the current climate of decreasing IT expenditure, consolidated storage is making huge inroads into the modern IT infrastructure.

In the corporate world, much is being made of the virtualisation space. The ability to consolidate workloads and reduce the number of hardware servers is a powerful driver in the current ‘Green’ economy. Modern server hardware is being designed and built specifically with virtualisation in mind.

But what about the small businesses, where there may not be an in-house IT support team, where the thought of changing something that isn’t broken is very daunting.