Monday, September 24, 2012

Cloud Computing Is Here To Stay


Tonight after dinner, my 7 year old daughter was on the computer in the office and I wanted to pay some bills before my trip next week - so I grabbed my iPad and sat down at the dining room table.

Take a look at how Cloud Computing impacted just 1.5 hours of my day:

  • I launched PNC Bank's Virtual Wallet app and laid out my bills on the table, entered them into bill pay, deposited a check through the app, and checked on my credit card balance.
  • I used the mSecure app to keep all of my passwords since it syncs with Dropbox from my iPad to my iPhone.
  • I then launched the Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) app to access the cash flow spreadsheet my business partner and I use to track monthly income and expenses.  (Can't edit spreadsheets in the app yet on the iPad - come on Goog!)
  • I had to send a scan of a bill to my business partner, so I launched Genius Scan's app, took a picture of the bill, cropped it, converted it to a PDF and emailed it through Gmail.
  • I then started working on our annual workers compensation audit from Traveler's Insurance.  They needed to know how much certain employees earned last year, so I accessed Paychex's App and reviewed the W-2s from each employee in question.

When I first started my sales career at NJ Bell (which eventually became Verizon), we had a dumb terminal on our desks which accessed the server.  We all thought this was crazy because when Tel-Star went down - no one could work!  In my opinion, we are swiftly headed to the days when a significant majority of our data is stored in the cloud.

If you are building a business or selling for one - if you aren't in the cloud, you're simply in trouble