Siamak Farah on Cloud Consolidation

Cloud Board Episode 1: Cloud Consolidation

InfoStreet CEO, Siamak Farah, talks about the evolution of the Cloud and Cloud apps. Farah explains how the Cloud has grown, how small businesses have benefited, and what the future holds for the Cloud.

Video Transcription

Hi my name is Siamak Farah I’m the founder and CEO of InfoStreet, we’re a Cloud app provider focusing on small business and today we have the first episode of Cloud Board which is a white board discussion of all matters cloud as it relates to small business.

Today we’re going to discuss how the cloud has evolved and how it’s benefits the small business and where it’s going to go from here.

So with that in mind I’m going to go take a little trip down memory lane, not too far distant in the past, as recent as last decade.

Most of us, we had servers in our office, and we would go ahead and install some apps on it and some of us did not have the money for a full time IT person we had these consultants where we paid a few hundred bucks a month, but unfortunately whenever we needed them in an emergency they were nowhere to be found. We had to always install, and reinstall, and then upgrade. And if the server crashed we had to replenish our hardware. And since we were not security experts you know when there was a virus or something we would lose several hours of productivity.

And in fact all those pains were the reasons that the cloud got such a big adoption from the small business and brought us to the more recent times where people in small business are taking advantages of, advantage of the benefits from the cloud and those are things like we don’t have to install things anymore we just point our browser they’re there and they scale with us.

You know if we grow our business or if we downsize the cloud grows with us we don’t have to think about whether we have hardware that is going to be used for boat anchors or whether we have to go and rush and buy new hardware it just works and grows with us. We have a pay as you go model we don’t have to pay upfront for licenses we pay as we need to which is another god sent for small business.

And most importantly, not only do we get solutions, we also kind of get IT in a box because we don’t have to have a IT and security expert on our premise because the cloud provider is providing that for us.

But as with all successes in the world, there are some pains as well. The Cloud became so successful that data is in multiple clouds now. And also, we are people that have multiple screens. Most of us have a desktop, have a laptop, have an iPhone, have an iPad, some people have Android and Galaxy, doesn’t matter, we are three to four screen people now a days. And these screens show the data differently and some of them don’t show all the data.

So the new need and the new response from the cloud is a centralized, secure place where you can have one cloud for all your apps, all your files, all your devices, still all the benefits of the cloud are there you don’t have to install, you pay as you go, but you have one central location where you get all your files. You can be in your office, you can be at home, or you can be on vacation in the internet café in Barcelona and you could have the same amount of productivity, same amount of cloud protection, but all with a centralized location and on multiple devices.

So that has been our episode of Cloud Board for small business.