Cloud services for small-to-medium business in Dublin and beyond
As your business reduces its dependence upon a local server in favour of distributed IT, Computers of South Dublin will help you choose the cloud services that are most essential to your business. These will be delivered and maintained in a manner that allows you & your key personnel to understand & manage these services as independently as possible.
Choosing your offsite storage plan
Off-site backup services from Irish companies, and those offered by Dublin IT support agencies, are heavily marked up due to the local industry being full of resellers. If you're not backing up your data offsite, or if you're paying more than 10 cents per gigabyte per month for backup service, a single COSD visit can get you started with any of these plans:
- Google Drive: the "DropBox killer." Essential for small businesses with no dedicated file server. Integrated desktop & mobile support. 5GB free storage or US$0.05 per GB per month (see rates).
- Amazon S3: can remotely back up file servers like the Synology Diskstation out-of-the-box. Long-integrated with web services, secure file downloading, and enterprise CMS. US$0.095 per GB per month, with 5GB free for the first year (see rates).
- rsync.net: provides a high-security remote UNIX file system. Favours exotic requirements and open systems such as Linux. US$0.80 per GB per month but includes top-flight integration support from the provider.
Note: Google and Amazon services are based at Dublin data centres so are trivially compliant with Data Protection Commission guidelines.
Amazon Web Services: find which ones you need and get cloud training
The idea that your Dublin business needed to purchase a Windows server to provide computing services has been going out the window since 2006. The now-mature Amazon Web Services (AWS) can provide virtual servers with as much computing power or storage as your business will ever need, without any hardware cost.
COSD can set up these services most immediately useful to small-to-medium business:
- Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service): pay only for off-site storage that you actually use. Files can be given URLs for popular or large downloads; even cloud-host your web site.
- Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud): create a virtual computer server accessible from your company network. This can provide cloud Windows hosting for database applications that formerly required an in-house Windows server.
- Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud): make it appear as if your Amazon cloud server is securely located on your own business network, accessible to the Internet, or both.
If these services are new to you, you owe it to yourself & your enterprise to schedule a morning or afternoon of cloud training at your site for COSD to demonstrate these services on the AWS Free Usage Tier. This will be a full demonstration of how to create & manage your virtual computer without spending a cent for the Amazon services themselves… please contact COSD to arrange this unique opportunity.
High-level application hosting: Google Apps Marketplace and other vendors
If you can find your desired application hosted already on the Internet, it may save you the effort of provisioning your virtual server as well as the cost of your physical server:
- If you're on Google Apps already, find business applications on Google Apps Marketplace (see video), for accounting, CRM, marketing, etc...
- More vendors are providing hosted (SaaS) versions of their applications: see Sage Cloud Ireland offering familiar Sage software for accounts, VAT, payroll, ERP, and CRM, and QuickBooks Online.
- If your application is web-based but you don't have a web server to run it on, COSD can install your enterprise application on a virtual server in the Amazon cloud.
COSD will help you choose whichever of these options best suits your business and adapt your existing business data and workflow to the hosted application.
- Contact COSD for a free email assessment of how cloud computing can lower your costs & extend the reach of your growing business, or to schedule your AWS cloud training session
- Read on to Customised computer training
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- Last Updated: 13 May 2017