Working in “The Cloud”…

Even though the term “Cloud Computing” may still be relatively new, what are the chances people will begin to work remotely once businesses start to implement a cloud platform? I can attest that with a 30 mile commute to work each day, the thought of working from home sometimes is very appealing. How appealing is it from a business aspect though? Can a business survive totally in the cloud? Could a business run from a “virtual” office?

This could definitely work for a business that had all of their applications hosted in the cloud. Think about it… if you used a service like Gmail or Outlook Cloud for all of your emails, met with Skype for all of your meetings, texted via MSN Messenger and could access all of your software applications via the cloud, so you could literally pull this off! What would the significant drawbacks be? I suppose you could say that there is no way to track the amount of work that an employee does, but we all know that that can all be tracked and stored in the cloud. You could say that not everybody knows their way around the internet. That would have been a logical excuse to make in 1997, but it’s 2011 now, and it should be a prerequisite to be fluent online. I guess you could say that it would lower the morale of the employees because of the lack of social interaction, but that’s why we have friends… right? You could even say the obvious, like… “What if we lose our internet connection?” That’s about the only legitimate excuse I could think of, but even with that it’s only temporary, so go outside for a short walk.

Honestly, I just can’t think of a single reason why a business, particularly in industries such as marketing, design, software, etc... couldn’t survive entirely in the cloud. I’m not saying that all businesses could survive in the cloud, but I think that a decent percentage could. Think about the infrastructure of your business. Is there anything that you need to do each day that you couldn’t do via the web? If you can’t think of anything, then you my friend could work in the cloud!