The future is in the clouds...

The future is in the clouds, but there will always be documents…

The current “big thing” in the IT world is the unfolding role of so-called cloud computing. Cloud computing was given that name to represent the amorphous and ethereal nature of the computing environment that exists when the majority of a companies IT infrastructure is moved onto or outsourced onto private or publicly shared networks of computers and storage. Many large companies have created private clouds and there are several well-know public clouds – those available to anyone to use (at a cost of course), from Amazon and Google and Microsoft, to name a few.

Cloud computing has had a long gestation period as the technologies and standards that are necessary to allow it to work were developed. There are still a few questions to be answered, but cloud computing has definitely arrived.  The physical networks themselves took time to evolve and reach the necessary levels of standards maturity and capability to allow for the successful deployment of cloud computing. Much of the necessary hardware, software and standards has come together only in the last 2-3 years; but, now cloud computing is not only possible, it is fast becoming an imperative for IT shops.

Why? Lower cost is a primary factor. After all cloud computing allows companies to get rid of the physical infrastructure and the hardware and system software maintenance that is normally associated with running internal data centers. Company IT shops can now focus upon implementing new software and systems that create new business opportunities, rather than devoting time, energy and money towards just keeping the shop running. The second cost saver is that many cloud business models charge only for what is being used – compute power, storage, and network bandwidth – rather than what is sitting in a data center waiting to be used.

One thing that will remain largely unchanged by cloud computing is the need to deal with the documents of business, whether they are customer generated or aimed at customers. Information will still come in to the company on paper and the company will still need to generate lots and lots of documents, both internal and customer focused. For all of the hoopla about going paperless and how smart phones or other electronic devices (PCs, laptops, net books, iPads, or whatever) will replace paper; commerce still runs on catalogues and price books and order forms and bills of lading and invoices and instruction manuals and all of the thousands of other paper-based documents of day-to-day business.

That’s where Xerox comes into the picture. Xerox is “the document company.” Better yet Xerox is the document company that is best positioned to play in a cloud computing IT strategy. The cloud needs inputs in electronic form, which means getting the information from all of those incoming documents into a form that applications in the cloud can understand and use. That often means scanning and no one offers a stronger set of scanning options than Xerox. Whether it’s scanning into a file, scanning into a searchable PDF format or scanning and recognizing bar codes or scanning and performing OCR to create editable files, Xerox multifunction devices can handle the task of getting the incoming customer documents into the cloud. In addition, Xerox has the best compression algorithms in the business for those scan files, so your network traffic is lower with Xerox-based scan files.

And, when and application in the cloud needs to produce a document for internal or customer use, no one offers a wider range of networked office and production level devices, both black and whiter and color, than Xerox. Whether you need to print a few thousand pages a month or a few million, Xerox has a device that can handle the load. From office documents like email or word documents or spreadsheets all the way to massive quantities of full color marketing brochures and instruction manuals. Xerox has a printing device for that. Call me today to discuss how we can help with your cloud computing initiative.