NBN special: cloud gazing

 It's fast. It's cheap. It's easy. It works.

What could possibly go wrong?

The US, which already has fibre to every home and business for a flat-rate access fee, gives a good indication of what to expect.

Resellers selling software as a service have been able to deploy vertical market solutions right across, says Kaseya's Dickinson (pictured).

The profitability in a cloud computing or SaaS model lies in achieving scale. A reseller targeting a vertical industry needs to sign up as many companies as possible; the more customers, the more profits.

Expensive bandwidth is a cost barrier to SMEs that reduces the true potential size of a SaaS market.

"If you asked a bunch of resellers whether they were doing SaaS in the US, about half would put up their hand. If you ask it in Australia, maybe 5 percent would put up their hand, and that would be for very basic [applications] like email, anti-virus, or stuff like that," says Dickinson.

Two of the biggest names in IT, Google and Amazon, focus on services from the cloud because the US fibre network makes delivery easy and cheap. Software companies are in the process of developing cloud-based versions of their programs.

The recently released Kaseya 6 is specifically designed to be made available from the cloud, says Dickinson. "If you look at a SaaS one of the key things is you can pick and choose what features you want and how much you want to pay."

A reseller can turn on just the patch management module, add patch management audit monitoring, or use the whole platform.

Cloud services compared

In CRN Tech this month we test out three established services: Amazon.com's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2), Salesforce.com and Trend Micro's hosted security. Overall, we believe hosted applications, when deployed where it fits with a customer's needs, can be a powerful solution to vault an enterprise into high levels of operation in short order at a limited cost.

But let's be clear: Don't expect "the cloud" to provide five-nines of availability and don't expect it to be the default solution for those wanting cost-competitiveness. Expect the unexpected.

For the rest of the review, go to techpartner.news/crntech.