Sponsored post: How Philly Businesses Can Better Float in the Cloud

This is a sponsored post from Jeff Thompson, CEO of Towerstream, a leading 4G service provider delivering high-speed wireless Internet access to businesses. Towerstream began providing service in Philadelphia in December 2009.
How did anything get done before e-mail? It wasn’t that long ago that when I wanted to electronically share a document with a colleague I saved it onto a disk and ran down the hall to hand it to him or her. Today, I can e-mail that same colleague while sitting in a plane at 35,000 feet from my iPad.
The way that we communicate is rapidly evolving and is affecting both our personal and professional lives. The ability to share information with numerous parties in a fraction of a second has made collaboration and group organization easy and mainstream.
Last month, Philadelphia made national headlines when Mayor Nutter told the New York Times that the city would begin to monitor social media sites as a way of preventing ‘flash mobs.’ In the workplace, our communication habits because of social media has also changed as businesses are quickly adapting new technologies.

One area that has taken off over the past year is cloud computing. No longer just a buzz word, cloud computing is becoming de rigueur for many businesses as a means of cutting costs, increasing efficiency and collaboration. As Gartner reported from this year’s annual survey of Chief Information Officers, cloud computing is the number two priority in 2010.
Over the past ten years of being a provider of high-speed wireless Internet for businesses, we have heard time and again from our clients that cost and reliability are the most important things that they consider when considering any type of infrastructure or technology update. The same rules apply when the more than 60,000 businesses in Philly consider moving their business to the cloud.
Cost and Reliability. Cloud Computing is without question a long-term cost-efficient solution, offering businesses of all sizes a way to store and transfer data without costly servers or, in some cases, IT staff. After your business moves to the cloud, you may find that you require increased bandwidth in order to accomodate increased uploads and downloads.Ask your service provider if they are able to quickly adjust your bandwidth and be sure to compare the rates for increased bandwidth between providers.
Additionally, when considering services to support and connect to the cloud, businesses should understand the financial implications of downtime or data loss. Ask your service provider what kind of guarantees they can provide to ensure against downtime or loss of connectivity. Do they have enough bandwidth and speed to support increased uploads and downloads? Will they be able to support all e-mail functions without slowing any core processes down? Businesses should carefully read their service agreements to understand how their service provider will accommodate requests for increased bandwidth and the speed at which they can fix interruptions.
Overall, the potential for cloud computing for businesses is enormous, from global collaboration to easily accessible online storage. It’s rapidly changing the way that we work, communicate and conduct business.
This is a sponsored post from Jeff Thompson, CEO of Towerstream, a leading 4G service provider delivering high-speed wireless Internet access to businesses. Towerstream began providing service in Philadelphia in December 2009. If you would like to write a sponsored post, contact us.