While many large companies are moving chunks of their IT infrastructure to the cloud, I believe the cloud will have an even bigger impact on SMBs. I recently sat down with fellow Network World contributer, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, SVP and co-founder of Nemertes Research who explained how, why and what he and Nemertes did in moving to the cloud. Not surprisingly they relied heavily on open source to do it.
My conversation with Andreas (who is a long time friend of mine and super sharp guy,) is about 20 minutes long. Andreas has a great handle on how the cloud can help you and your company and how open source can let you do it for a lot less money. Oh and still be secure! You can have a listen below.
Nemertes is a small company with less than 20 employees. Also they are all virtual which made moving to the cloud even more attractive. Interestingly at the same time they moved to the cloud, almost every single one of Nemertes employees given the choice, opted to switch off of Windows. Many moved over to Mac, but others moved to Linux.
Andreas himself is a Linux geek, so he is very comfortable with the Nemertes IT infrastructure hosted on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/PERL) open source stack. But Andreas doesn't stop there. As you will learn listening to the interview, Nemertes has put a wide range of open source solutions to use on the Amazon Cloud where they host. Even their security is open source-based.
I was surprised to really hear the wide range of open source applications that you can run on an Amazon cloud set up. The other really surprising thing was the ridiculously low cost of doing so compared to what they are receiving. Of course, being elastic when they need to turn something up for a short time, they do so a fraction of the cost having to buy that infrastructure.
You really need to listen to Andreas here and find out how they did it!