Cloud computing at Telecetera
What is Cloud Computing?
Connect Cloud
The latest version of the Connect software product runs in the Cloud. Previously, all the software ran on servers in our office or ‘on premise’, i.e. in the offices of each customer.
What is The Cloud?
Cloud computing is on-demand delivery of computing resources (think servers in data centres) on a pay as you go basis. Instead of having our own on premise set of servers, and a second (and ideally third) set for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) purposes, we just pay for what we need when we use it. We do not need any on premise servers, do not need our own data centre and 2-3 network engineers keeping all the lights flashing green.
There are several Cloud Computing platforms available to companies building software or hosting systems and services. Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud are the main providers.
Telecetera Ltd is a Microsoft Cloud Partner (MCP). Our team champions Microsoft Azure as our ‘go to’ cloud platform for our own products and for any customer products we design and build for our customers (i.e. outsourced DevOps services).
Microsoft Azure
All our software is written in the C# (pronounced ‘C sharp’) programming language. This is Microsoft’s language that has evolved continuously since 2003. Within Azure are several services, such as Azure SQL Server, which is the cloud version of SQL Server Database server. Also, there are services such as Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) and Azure Functions. Azure functions are discrete chunks of code that run once and service one, usually atomic, service. They then terminate when they finish. These are ideal for processing incoming data, which needs to be parsed (decoded), stored in the Database, then another Azure Function or service notified.
Microsoft charge for two aspects of Cloud Computing – compute (processing) and storage (disk space). When services are not running, e.g. late at night or over a weekend, we are only billed for storage. When software is running, i.e. CPU time on a server is active, the account holder is billed.
Benefits of Cloud Computing
As organisations move from ‘on premise’ IT to cloud-based IT infrastructure, there are still costs associated. However, there are many benefits. First, the software company does not need to own any IT infrastructure. They simply pay for a service. The service is resilient, in that the software company can choose to failover to another server, failover to another server cabinet, failover to another Data Centre (DC) and even failover to another Region.
Several geographical regions exist. The Connect Cloud version operates in the ‘UK South region and fails over to ‘UK West’ region. This means that all customer data is stored in England and is protected by English Law.
Scalability
Another key benefit is scalability. If all our Connect Customers should happen to log on at 08:00 on Monday morning in the UK, then the system will automatically scale to service all the disk and CPU requirements needed by the software. As the number of users decreases, the disk and CPU usage will shrink back.
Resilience by design
A key benefit is that if the worst happens in our office, e.g. a fire, flood, or internet outage, then there will be little if no impact on the service that our team can provide to our customers. I believe the outsourcing of all operational IT to a Data Centre using Cloud services is how business and organisational IT and software should be provisioned.
This gives our company resilience by design and offers a great level of service to our customers.
In fact, thanks to the wizardry of modern technology, I wrote this blog recently on the Eurostar, and connected to Wi-Fi under the Channel I was able to check our support desk. I just logged in for an update on an alert we received on Saturday evening. Our company website was down for seven minutes. It is likely that our hosting company was performing updates to the servers on which our website it hosted.
Conclusion
Cloud computing will not save organisations a massive amount of money, but what it will do is allow them to scale and to improve their digital resilience.
If you would like to find out more about Cloud Computing, please contact us via the company website www.telecetera.co.uk or call us on 01905 612220.
Steve
Steve Borwell-Fox
Managing Director
Telecetera Ltd
