Could you run your business online? The article from Infoworld talks about how many tools and services we have available online these days. Between Google Apps and Microsoft Live you have a tremendous amount of business tools online, but in case you need more specialized applications, Salesforce.com, 37 Signals and more have great offerings that cover the majority of what many businesses need.
Even if you plan on developing software, for which you need desktop tools, you still might be able to work mostly online for mail, project management, even distribution. I wouldn't count out the possibility that any small business could run with the vast majority of their systems online, perhaps removing the need for an IT guy or even servers in your office.
But would you want to? I know I wouldn't, at least not right now with the state of things. I've owned a couple of businesses, including this one, and while we took advantage of services from other companies, we also made sure that we owned a good amount of our hardware. It's given us some flexibility and backup and control. Owning our own web server has prevented issues from other users interfering with us and it's allowed us to easily move to new hosting locations, something that we did 3 or 4 times in the early history of SSC. Renting servers would have been more expensive for us, especially as our bandwidth needs increased.
I've investigated "cloud"-type services over the years, but honestly I've always been concerned that the level of service and responsiveness might not be there. I'll admit, however, that me and my partners are conservative and so we get nervous about trusting someone else with the ownership and management of our core business. There's also the feeling that if I need to have a server for backup, and I think I need one, then am I better off just owning 2 servers and using one for work and one for backup? I think so.
Most people will never start their own business, and I understand that. It's a gut-wrenching decision for most of us, including me, and the decision to take on all that additional work and risk is outside the comfort zone for the majority of IT people. But if you think you might want to, the cost of getting started is definitely lower now than at any point with all the services available. I'm not sure I'd try to do it with the "free" services that companies offer, but with a small investment, you might find yourself building a new career if you're willing to try.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
The podcast feeds are now available at sqlservercentral.mevio.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.
or now on iTunes!
- Windows Media Podcast - 28.2MB WMV
- iPod Video Podcast - 25.7MB MP4
- MP3 Audio Podcast - 5.2MB
Today's podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.
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