More and more these days I talk to people who are trying to figure out how and whether cloud computing fits into their business model. Cloud computing is really a new version of the old style of mainframe computing where diverse groups share the computing power and storage of large systems. Cloud computing, ideally, will be engineered to minimize or eliminate single points of physical failure. Physical system failure, however, is only one item of many that can affect your system’s performance and uptime.

Hardware configurations, including manufacturer choices, operating systems versions and configurations, firewall rules and ongoing maintenance of all the above heavily impact the performance and reliability of your systems.

Regardless of whether you have computers in your broom closet, colocated at your ISP or deployed in the cloud, your company needs a good system administrator looking out for your network and machines. Good system administrators know the pros, cons and quirks of different hardware, operating systems and network configurations. They know about possible vulnerabilities first because they are on private security lists you don’t even know exist. They’ve got your back. George Reese of enStratus, expanded on this in a recent post that compares programmers and sys admins.

One of the big differences between an ipHouse virtual machine (which is essentially deployed in a local cloud) and deploying a server with one of the national cloud providers, is the sys admin expertise that comes with your ipHouse machine. We work with you to make sure the system configuration is optimized for your business applications. We can also administer the machine for you, keeping it securely patched and up-to-date.