Andrew Nimick - Technology consultant Andrew is an independent technology consultant whose focus is what technology can do for business and finding the best tools for the job.

As well as appearing on TV last week I attended an event called Cloud Camp in Auckland. This was an unconference. I have written about these before. It's a very relaxed adult version of the school show and tell. This one was about the cloud. Which is a term applied to systems which allow you to run your IT systems on other peoples' servers and only pay for what memory and processing you are using at the time.

This is like only for the electricity to run a program on your home machine and then paying a bit more for each other program you run. You don't hire a server and you are not restricted by the server you did not hire. Your data and the processors, which are running it, can be spread across many servers in a data farm. But it all gets backed up and stored safely.
We all use services which are in the cloud, but may not know it. Gmail runs in a cloud infrastructure so does Salesforce.
In fact, I had a long good chat with Clayton Brown of Salesforce about this. Salesforce is one of the oldest cloud providers. It was interesting to hear about the levels they go to, to provide secure governance, including third party oversight.
And one of the biggest issues for discussion on the day was governance. Questions like, who owns the data, what are the issues around national jurisdiction, how do we move our procedures to a cloud infrastructure and how do we migrate it if we need to? We had ICT lawyer Rick Shera on hand to help, so it was not a bunch of geeks making it up.
The cloud is set to become a tool many of us will use, especially in SMB's. Why? Price. Cloud based software has far smaller overheads and scales very easily compared to the old, cd and update solutions. As data portability improves it will also be easier to move your data from one provider to another to get the best deals and service. If you are in retail look out for my next post about VendHQ.