First, let me caution everyone about some new phishing attempts going on. If you see emails that appear to come from Amazon (for that matter from any company), never click on the links in the email. Instead, as always, you should open a browser and manually type in the address to login. This holds true for emails that appear to be from banks (even if you bank at the same bank the email appears to come from.)

This week I want to write about the many faces of cloud computing. First, don't let the name fool you, all clouds are not created equal!

There are many companies providing cloud type services, some are large enterprises and some are small businesses. No matter the size of the company providing the service, you need to check the service level agreements offered by these cloud services. For example, a small company might provide 99.999% up time while a large company might only offer a "best effort" service. This was the case with Google cloud services until very recently, they only offered best effort basis service.

Even though Google started to offer their cloud services a good while before Microsoft ever did, but Microsoft did build new infrastructure to start off with business class services that were guaranteed instead of Google's best effort service. So, where Google comes in at a lower price, Microsoft appeals more to enterprises where uptime is very important.

Currently large players like Google and Microsoft offer specific cloud services, for example, document editing, email hosting, etc. Some of the smaller players offer much more than these specific service. For example, PCSN offers full hosted servers and workstations. This means you can run and customize these servers any way you want and configure your workstations in any fashion. This type of setup has several advantages, you get to run all your applications, you get to see the full desktop just like you did on your internal machines, you get better up time and disaster recovery. The best part is, even if you shut down your office (due to maybe a hurricane), your users can keep working and get to the information they need by logging into their cloud desktop from any machine, anywhere.