Tasos Christidis

The cloud business brings some very interesting and unique characteristics in the way customers and vendors are engaging: For the first time in computer history massive amounts of data are processed and stored outside the physical boundaries of the enterprise (its LAN or WAN). Also, vendor companies can reside thousand miles away from the customer premises and they are run by people that most probably the customer will never meet in person or maybe even talk on the phone. These unique characteristics make the customer/vendor relationship very interesting and also somewhat difficult to describe. Such relations are typically governed by the Service Level Agreement (SLA) which the customer signs or in some cases just “accepts” with the click of a button on the web page of the cloud service they’re subscribing to.

One of the many advantages of web applications (Software as a Service – SaaS applications are the best example here) is their “portability”. Before the rise of business web applications one had to tap in a corporate server using difficult to understand or use technologies like “remote desktop” etc., to gain access to corporate data and functionality. Then the World Wide Web came and new, reliable and safe (although many don’t believe so) applications saw the light of day. Tapping into the corporate environment became so much easier. Also, using a computer other than one’s own became possible (e.g. internet café, a friend’s house, borrowed during vacation etc.)