Over the last month or so I have been busy assessing various hosting providers for our product. The host is a technical partner who is responsible for ensuring our products are always running and safe from illegitimate access.

In the past, and even today, a hosting company managed hundreds to thousands of servers and when a new customer wanted to go online the customer deduce what size server is needed or whether they can share a server with other customers. That arrangement works well but it can be expensive and it does not scale very well so what else is there? The alternative is a new type of hosting environment: Cloud computing.

Cloud computing (also known as utility or on-demand) enables companies like Istobe to buy chunks of processing power, memory and storage space as we need it. Previous to cloud computing the determination on what size server we needed from our host was kind of like trying to buy boxes for a move. You know that you want to get more than enough boxes to package all your goods but you do not want to have too large of a surplus. Having cloud computing as an option is like having a box machine available during your move, when you need another you push the “create box” button and out pops another perfect box. Once your move is complete you pay for the boxes you used.  What does this mean for our customers?

Cloud computing provides a lot of direct value to our customers.  Cost savings is one, other less obvious benefits are:

• Data Security- Each customer has an isolated instance of our product, eliminating the possibility of one customer gaining access to another’s data.
• Quick Feature Release- Isolated instances allow us more flexibility in deploying new features or features for customer-specific needs because we can easily perform “soft” roll-outs to determine if the features are helpful and usable.
• Performance- Since we can scale our products based on the needs of each customer we are able to ensure that each customer has the highest performing system available. With a dedicated environment for each customer we reduce the possibility of high-usage customers causing other customers to have a negative experience.

Cloud computing is just one technology that will enable Istobe to make enterprise level analytics solutions available to anybody.