What's the Scooby Doo Mystery Behind the "Cloud"?
The 21st century has given us workdays of looking through a mirror to catch a spy and close the Girls Gone Wild UStream because offerings such as Evernote and cloud computing have increased downtime. When you hear people refer to the "cloud" they aren't describing the reefer smoke out of which dreadlocks dangle while dice roll onto the sidewalk. The "cloud" is the image of the Virgin Mary in a homeless guy's armpit stains.
We reach a point where everyone needs to download the same torrent, often slowing down a network. When the clock strikes five and we still aren't done with work, our personal computers need the same spyware and popups as our company's computer. Same software- without the immortal hourglass on every click. But who wants to load all that porn spyware onto your home computer? How many Hot Wheels cars get rolled on our personal computer's keyboards? Probably a lot.
Basically, when you work on the "cloud", you've got the server capacity of a nuclear power plant. No more computers with sparks shooting out of the keyboard and smoke rising out of the cooling vents. Everything is web-based and doesn't cry at 2 am and pee on you when you change it. The subway b-boy dancing to Michael Jackson with a silver glove, uploading footage of his ensemble on the internet will not be able to read your important data or files. When should you slit your wrists if you don't have the cloud?
1. You own the Empire State Building and the janitors have to share the notification software which tells them when the toilet on their floor flooded the bathroom with sewage.
2. When 200 homeless people need to know which bunk they get at the your foundation's shelter on the same spreadsheet.
3. You have IT constantly focused on removing spyware loading pop-ups with pictures of broken teeth and Tiger Woods Viagra endorsements.
4. You need to pay your employees with peanut butter and cheese- Cloud is paid incrementally.
5. You need the ability to have employees work from Osama Bin Laden's cave if necessary.
Cloud solutions, like Zoho, will allow you to give employees areas and access to both shared and private resources; like open urinals and closed toilets in the mens room. This grants employees to managers to assistants to executives their own level of access- much like gang signs and tear-drop tattoos. Depending on your company, or set you claim, this could be vital.
Cloud Hosting Solution
Mosso, owned by Rackspace, is a cloud hosting solution. The great thing about a cloud hosting solution is the fact that everything can be done while clipping your toenails at an angle which allows you to shoot nail clippings at your wife cheek. With cloud hosting, you could make servers the size of Rainman's memory or George Bush's vocabulary.
Hosted Exchange
There is another Cloud out there which lets you take 2-hour lunches. Hosted Exchange holds press conferences to tell the planet it could use Microsoft Exchange... via cloud. Why would your business need this when you can simply access Microsoft Exchange/Outlook by waiting half-an-hour before lunch for your PC to boot? Business has insomnia; you wake up @ noon with a joint on your headboard. Hosted Exchange makes it easy to access Microsoft Exchange from your mobile phone, your Star Trek blaster, or your Taser. They are all conjoined, so any porn you were downloading onto your desktop will also be available when you leave the office.
* Erectile dysfunction Spam and H1N1 virus protection
* A control panel that easily lets you send trojan horses to people telling you just inherited Prince Zamunda's fortune.
* 2 GB of mailbox storage so you don't have to throw knives at your postman when he peppersprays your pitbull.
* The ability to tell your co-workers where tonight's wet t-shirt contest is being held.
* Multiple daily backups, so you don't have to worry about losing that never before seen footage of princess Leia stripping for Han Solo in her Jabba the Hutt's Slave bikini.
* Ability to send that 50MB image of that haiku religious chain poem that your uncle forwarded to you from Ethiopian tribes working peace corp.
Sure beats the heck out of rolling your desktop in the basket of your daughter's Huffy just to use Exchange. Although I suppose not having access to Hosted Exchange would give you a reason to stop working after the office is closed... you need to go scrub skid marks off convicts' underwear up north. You're not an American.
Cloud Collaboration Tools:
There are a few tools, such as Google Wave and Zoho, that a business could utilize to the fullest of there phishing potential. It replaces the need for a broom closet for office extramarital quickies or when you have employees shooting lines of coke and gun powder with AIDS' infested hookers in blood diamond country.
Google Wave:
Google Wave, as every other Google app, is in infinite beta and not available to Al Qaeda. There are a lot of users to ban. Many personally use Wave a lot for booty calls.
Google Docs doesn't try hard enough to be as good as Microsoft Office. So if you must go G - put your hands in the air and do the wave. Let's face it, we live in a world where people want their eulogy to come true yesterday; cloud based tools such as Google Wave helps the boy become Rupert Murdoch. So how is Wave useful if your company is already using Google Docs, and you don't want to make people bungee jump out of their office window tied to the phone cord? Documents stored on Google Docs can be float, like a dried human turd, on a wave.
* Start a new wave and click on the green puzzle-piece gadget icon.
* When it prompts you, enter "http://wave-ide.appspot.com/iframe.xml" and then hit "edit"
* Once you hit edit, click " URL" and copy and paste the URL to the document you want to embed
* Adjust the size of the wave
Add your fellow RIAA most-wanted music pirate users into the wave, and everyone who has access to the shared document can view it and generate fake product keys from there. This prevents the computer from blowing up in your face because you have too many windows open, which can make you work the computer slower than Tarzan's monkey typing with his feet. People are still hiring nurses to kidnap babies for Google Wave invites. Invites tend to come within a few hours of you wiring them your grandfather's social security check. Once you have your own login, you can send another invite to employees who let you deduct 50% of their paychecks to your tab at the gentlemen's club with pregnant strippers. As far as I can tell, Wave is fairly stable as long as a hung over Google net admin doesn't throw up on a server.
Zoho Project : Project Management
Zoho is another great cloud tool that can be used to fly a private jet with a SI swimsuit model on your lap. I find Zoho to be more organized than a gay drill instructor. I would say Zoho is a more complete content management system than a prehistoric woodpecker chiseling words into slate of granite on the Flintstones. First off, Zoho projects is a project management solution which allows you to let good employees use the keyboard while bad employees have to finger paint with dog diarrhea to write a memo. An example of how easy Zoho is to use? If you want to add multiple users in your project portal, simple go to "Add Users", enter their email address and the clearance you want them to have (employee, admin, contractor, mistress, toilet scrubber, butt wiper, royal bather, illegal alien gardener, etc.) and the projects you would like them to be able to see. This is excellent when you have a team of people panhandling in Grand Central and the other beating a bucket for spare change on the subway.
This is the Zoho projects dashboard. As you can tell, it has a very clean interface and easy enough for a 9-year old to use shooting spit balls at a touch screen iPad. There's no need to work next to that employee whose rotten dead-rat and raw onion body odor is blown onto you by the fan behind him. You have everything from records of drug sales, to police bribes, to stolen credit card numbers in here. Zoho also offers email, reports, invoicing, loan shark and check-fraud tutorials and more.
I hope introducing you to these various cloud tools will encourage you to explore options other than scrubbing fish on the coast of an Asian sewage dump. Computers keep getting closer to manufacturing terminators to kidnap the human race and leave the rest of us eating squirrel shish-ke-bobs. In order to excel and compete, we need to keep up with new and innovative ways to teach our children to join the military and steal as many guns and nano droids that they could fit in their duffel bag. Gone are the days of rats chewing into hardwired networks, crashing servers erasing everybody's social security numbers, or Microsoft Exchange limitations to a broom closet and the complimentary dumb-phone you get with the plan. Some who love to work may be singing coombaya because they have another excuse to stay away from having to duck dishes thrown at them by their wives. Either way, we refuse to act out an infomercial on the train to sell pens with erasers, candy, and burn our eyelids so people could think we're blind and give us money.