Cloud computing is all the rage these days.  Every time you turn around you’re hearing something about how it’s the wave of the future and how it’s cheaper, better, faster, etc.  For some businesses, the “move to the cloud” can be a good thing, but in other cases it can be a very risky proposition.  You need to ask yourself – can your business rely on the cloud?

Recently, Amazon’s EC2 cloud server service went down for more than a day.  If you are/were an Amazon customer using this service you lost service.  In some cases you lost data and in some cases the data that was lost was NOT recoverable.  Some major players in the social media landscape (Foursquare, Reddit, Quora, Hootsuite and Moby) were completely unusable.  Additionally portions of CNET’s functionality was compromised.  CNET’s response?  “We’ll be back shortly, we hope. Sorry, it sucks for us too. We’d point fingers, but we wouldn’t be where we are today without EC2.” Read the rest of this entry

NOTE: Since this post was originally created, Dropbox experienced a serious security issue for a small amount (less than 1%) of users.  The issue has been addressed and corrected.
Full details can be found here.

With one of the questions on our yearly Customer Satisfaction Survey we asked our customers for suggestions for blog topics that they’d like to read about.  Several customers indicated they’d like to know more about “The Cloud” and specifically applications such as Dropbox.  You asked for it and here it is!

(While this may sound like a commercial for Dropbox, I assure you that Acroment is not getting compensated in any way for this post.  In addition, I only review products that I’ve used.)

Dropbox is an application that allows you to access your files from multiple computers, devices (such as your smart phone) and websites.  You no longer have to email files to yourself, carry a jump drive or portable hard drive or have multiple copies of a file.  Sounds pretty good right?  Wait… it gets better.  It’s completely FREE.   Read the rest of this entry

Tips for evaluating suspicious emails from Eric Clemens on Vimeo.  This video explains how you can better evaluate suspicious messages and avoid opening emails which may harm your computer. Instructions are for Outlook 2007, but should apply to other email programs such as Outlook 2003, Outlook 2010, and Thunderbird. Click the video to view full screen.

This is our first of many videos to come. Please leave us a comment to tell us how we can improve these videos or other topics we can present in the future. Thanks for watching!