 Welcome to TechSoup Top. Today's webinar is Cloud Computing, Why Should You Care? I'd like to welcome Annie Yeager and Peter Campbell. But before we do introductions, I want to tell you a little bit about TechSoup for those of you who might be new to our organization. We are working towards a time when every nonprofit and social benefit organization on the planet has the technology resources and knowledge they need to operate at their full potential. Here's a screen grab of our home page. For those of you who haven't been to our website, it's techsoup.org. There you'll find a learning center full of articles as well as our webinar recordings. A link to Get Products where you will find donated products from Adobe, Symantec, Microsoft, and about 35 other businesses. We have a blog where daily different messages are posted with a special program for libraries, and a couple of newsletters that you can subscribe to, and a whole bunch of other stuff going on. So if you haven't been to our website yet, please take a minute to check us out. Now I'd like to introduce our speakers. I'm really happy to be doing yet another webinar with Annie Yeager, my co-worker. So Ann, I want you to tell us a little bit about what you do here at TechSoup. Ann Yeager Hi, Tammy, and everyone who has joined us. I am the co-director of TechSoup Global Green Tech Initiative. And what we do is we help nonprofits reduce their environmental impact through the effective use of technology. Basically, we help you reduce the impact of your IT, and use IT to reduce the impact of your organization. Great. Thanks Ann. And now Peter, would you please introduce yourself? Sure. I'm Peter Campbell. I'm currently the IT director at Earth Justice, a public interest environmental law firm. Our motto is, because the Earth needs a good attorney. I have a career spanning about 15 or 20 years in technology management at commercial and nonprofit organizations. And I also write for and serve on the board for Idealware.idealware.org is a great resource for anybody looking for information on nonprofit focused software. Excellent. And we've done a couple of webinars with Idealware with Lara Quinn. So a really wonderful resource for those of you who haven't heard of Idealware.org. So now I'd like to also thank, we've got a couple other folks behind the scenes here helping out to make this webinar a success. We've got Elliott Harmon and Kevin Mel, and a new person to our team, Eric Lewis, who will be answering chat questions. So if you have any questions, submit those to the chat. So at this point I'd like to turn it over to Anna. She's going to start by doing some quick little calls. We're just trying to get a sense of the audience out there. So if you can let us know what your knowledge of cloud computing is, are you a beginner? Don't even know what you're talking about. An intermediate may be doubled in it or advanced. So if you could fill them in, we'll move on here in just a moment. Okay, we're just waiting for everyone to submit their answer. Okay, we'll close the poll. There you go. Great, so you guys cannot see. We've got a lot of the beginners in the audience. We've got a few intermediate folks and just a handful of advanced folks. So I think we will be targeting more of the beginner folks. We're going to have more of an overview here session. But feel free if you have more intermediate or advanced questions as we go through chatting those questions and we can try to address them either in the forums afterwards or in the Q&A section. Let's move on to the next poll as well. Do any of you actually use cloud computing either in your organization or personally? Do you have an email account from Hotmail or Google or one of those? Go ahead and fill those in now and we'll have to pull open for just a moment here. Okay, we have about everyone. I'm going to close the poll. Great, so even though a lot of you such identified as beginners, obviously you're still using cloud computing. So that's great. I'm glad you have some sort of foundation in it. Well, let's get started and if you could tell us just to find cloud computing. Sure, cloud computing, hopefully it'll load here for you in a moment, is really about using software or hardware over the Internet. Here's a broader definition. Also these slides are somewhat paired down. You'll be receiving these after the call. But if you want more detail, there's a more detailed set of these slides up on SlideShare. And we'll also make sure that you get a link to that as well. Another aspect of cloud computing other than just being software or hardware that you access over the Internet is often they are either free or they're paid per use. So you pay only for what you're consuming. And often the more robust cloud offerings you can get in a self-service way. You probably didn't need anybody's help to set up your Gmail account. You just went and filled out a form online. Same thing for a lot of the cloud services that we are seeing today. You can go sign up and requisition whatever it is that you need. Cloud computing is really a business model. Some people say, what's all the hype about? There's very little from a technical capability standpoint that's really new. Virtualization is a technology that underlies cloud computing and makes it possible. And that's been in use for a number of years now. So the technology, whether the conference might seem new, the technology has been around for a while. Generally when we talk about cloud computing, there are three types that we talk about. Infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service. The software as a service is the one that most nonprofits, especially some medium-sized nonprofits, will be utilizing in the near future. So infrastructure as a service, what is it? That's your servers. Think of a server, a box actually in somebody else's data center and you can access it over the Internet. Generally what you do is you migrate to it so you have to install an operating system and your applications on it. Platform as a service, let me get my pointer here. So that was IIS, platform as a service. You know that you've got the box, the hardware server out there, but somebody else is taking care of the operating system or the database management software. These you generally build on. That's more for developers who want to build their own applications. So again, not something that I'd expect to be in broad adoption right now with nonprofits. But software as a service is something you consume. That's where you've got software that you access over the Internet and you use it. And it seems like the majority of you actually already are doing that today. So those are the three broad categories and then a number of applications and providers who fall into those different categories. And I'll show you here in just a moment some of the examples. So for instance, for infrastructure as a service, we've got Amazon. They really have servers, but you have to add your own operating system. Google, however, has an application engine. If you want to build your own application, that's more platform as a service. So they take care of the operating system and they have a lot of tools for developers to use. Microsoft Azure has both, or right now they have platform as a service where they will take care of the operating system for you, do all the security patches of that. And soon they're going to be launching infrastructure as a service as well, which is just again the server sitting in their form. You can put any operating system on it that you'd like. They also have some SaaS offerings, software as a service. And we do refer to software as a service as SaaS, S-A-A-S. An example of their SaaS offerings is called B-Pause or Business Productivity Online Suite. We'll get to more of that later. Another example that you might be familiar with of SaaS is Salesforce. So if any of you are using Salesforce, you're using Cloud Computing. Also, Greenpeace you may have heard has recently put out a paper that said, Cloud Computing is it really green? And what they're referring to is these large data centers are often built next to cold consuming plants, power plants. So they're not saying that Cloud Computing itself is not green, but they're saying we have to put pressure on some of the providers to build their data centers in greener ways. And many of them have actually started to do that. Why should you care? This is a big question. Some folks are predicting that cloud services will increase at an annual rate. So spending on cloud services will increase at an annual rate of 26%. That's very rapid. Compare that to the annual spending rate, anticipated annual spending rate of 5% for all the rest of IT. So you can see that it's predicted to move very quickly. Also, I try to put, just to inform you, I've tried to put the sources as links in the bottom of when I'm presenting any sort of statistics. So you can find the actual source itself. Some of the benefits of Cloud Computing, this slide might be a little misleading, so make sure to check out the more detailed slide in the notes. But little to no upfront costs. Often you don't have to buy servers. You don't have to buy software. You can just kick it off. And there's no startup cost or minimal startup cost, but watch out for recurrences. You've got operating costs that are often more than you were experiencing before. Little to no IT staff required. This is an oversimplification, but often it's true. Like I said, did you need help setting up your email account? Probably not. With some of the more basic stuff like document sharing or project management software, you probably don't need a whole lot of help from an IT person to get you up and running. But if you're going with something more like a CRM that needs to be configured for you, obviously you will need some consulting time. No on-site servers. Here's one of the green benefits. You're not buying servers which are very dirty. We'll get to that in just a moment. Rapid deployment, often these things are turnkey. You request your account and you've got one within minutes or within the hour. Convenience, if you have staff, remote staff, remote volunteers, they can access these systems as well without requiring you to set up a complex VPN or other complex network or have your people in your office. As long as they have an Internet connection, they should be able to access cloud services. And this last one is a bit of a benefit and a curse. So you're always on the road of software. You're more worrying about whether you have to upgrade or you weigh behind. Are you on software that's no longer supported? You're always on the road of software. But beware, you might not be ready to be on the latest software. If you customize anything, you have to watch out and make sure that you're doing it in a way that when the vendor plans to their upgrade, you are not left behind and so they might have a broken system. So, Arne, if I can just jump in. I have a couple of comments on some points on this slide. As I said in the little or no upfront costs, I kind of read that as a transfer of costs. In the not-cloud computing environment, we have big capital investments in hardware, in servers, in infrastructure. And in the cloud, you don't. Somebody else has already bought those and they're renting them to you. But the maintenance costs and monthly costs go up. So different vendors, different cloud computing opportunities are going to offer opportunities for cost savings. But in general, I think it's kind of a shift, not a break. And then I like to comment. I'm reasonably sure with this many people on the call, we have a number of people who actually work in IT listening. And I read the little or no IT staff required. When I hear that, or people on my IT staff hear that, it sounds kind of scary. Are we going to eliminate IT? And my take on it is that what we're doing is we're changing what IT does. When cloud computing, and I think it is kind of an assumption that cloud computing will become much more prevalent, will need less people maintaining servers and doing that kind of work in our offices. But for the smart IT people who are flexible and can learn new skills, it's an opportunity to do more meaningful work, more work that is helping people use the software, configuring the software to meet the mission. And I think that overall, if we can adapt IT people like me, this is going to mean that we'll do better work and we'll have more satisfying jobs. Great. Thanks, Peter and Anna. Now I'd like to learn a little bit more about how this is impacting nonprofits and libraries specifically. Anna, can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure thing. So what cloud computing really does in many respects is it allows you to focus more on your mission and your programs. It should ideally take away a lot of the infrastructure pain that you might be suffering. For instance, we're always having to work on our exchange server because we're not on the latest version and we're overloading it. So we spend a lot of infrastructure time instead of being able to focus on our mission and programs. Here's that other one that I mentioned before, always on the latest technology, a blessing and a curse. Often it's a wonderful thing. Just make sure you're prepared to manage it. Predictable measurable cost. So again, instead of having your upfront costs where you have to buy servers, you have to buy software, what if those servers die unexpectedly? Suddenly you have to come up with another $2,000 to $3,000 to replace your server. This way your servers don't die. You have repeatable measurable cost. It's like a utility. You know approximately how much you pay for energy each month. You should know approximately how much you should expect to pay for your cloud computing each month. Save on total cost of ownership. I'm not so clear on this one. It really depends on the software or the service that you're using. Some of them, sure, you really will save on total cost of ownership. Otherwise it will spread out the cost as Peter was saying, less upfront, but shifting to more monthly ongoing costs. And improved capabilities and service levels, especially in SMAT to medium-sized nonprofits, I think you can expect to see this. What I mean by it is that folks, they'll have more uptime on their servers. Often servers are more secure than you can do, especially if you have limited IT staff. And limited skills in certain areas. And you should be looking at SLA's with each vendor that you're working with. So now we'll get to some of the shifting of costs and the shifting of how you might work. More choices means more complexity. So now we've got something you can install on your computer or a version in the cloud. How do you compare those? So it is more complicated and more confusing. It might take a little bit more time for you to sort out what is the right choice for our organization. I would encourage you, especially if you're a SMAT to medium-sized nonprofits, look for more mature services out there. So web hosting, HR services, and conferencing like ReadyTalk, the one that we're using right now. And steer clear of the less mature ones, security and disaster recovery, those aren't quite there. Forrestor actually has done some reporting and grading of some of the offerings out there. And it's put them in different buckets. And actually my take on this is that it's kind of the wild west. There's everything out there. So from disaster recovery standpoint, a lot of these services are really scary. And there have been some famous stories of web services that people have had accounts on and relied on that were actually run out of somebody's basement. And when the server died, they didn't have a backup and they just completely went under. But then contrast that to Google where if you have a Google Docs account, every time you save your document or spreadsheet, it's saved to two separate servers in two separate data centers in two different parts of the country, which to me is better disaster recovery than I have in my organization even though we put a lot of work into that. So always evaluate carefully and ask those questions. There's often a lower barrier of entry for small to medium size nonprofits. This isn't always true. It depends on the application you're looking at. But even for some of those larger scale applications, you don't need to do as much of the installation, making sure you have the right servers and making sure you have the right software. You just need to configure it and start using it. So you might find that it's actually more cost effective for you to start using cloud computing. And then if you find it's not working for you as long as you haven't invested too much, you can shift back and shift away. Here we're getting to some of the shifting use. We don't expect everybody to just jump in and start using the cloud, but more staff and volunteers have access to your systems outside the office. So you're able to have a bit more flexibility and involve more people in the work that you're doing. And a lot of these services have free or discounted services for nonprofits. So always check those out. Here are a few examples listed right here of those who have free or discounted offerings. We also expect over the next 6-8 years that people aren't just going to jump in and go all-cloud, but you'll see more of a hybrid cloud adoption where you have some things installed on-site or on your computer, your personal computer, and some use in the cloud. The new version of MS Office 2010, actually it comes bundled with that so you can do work on your PC. And then when you want to collaborate and share, you have a web version of it, access to a web version of it as well. For free that you can use to share that stuff. So you have a bit more flexibility. We also expect to see shifting software costs. And over the next 6-8 years, I wouldn't expect your software and IT costs to change very much. But again, like we said, it will shift from the upfront costs to the more monthly utility-like costs. So more monthly fees, less upfront. Hardware costs we do expect to gradually go down for nonprofits over the next 6-8 years. As you shift off your in-house servers and onto cloud servers, you can expect that those will gradually go down. But I would not expect it to change dramatically over the next few years. You might also find that if you're using some cloud computing, you might be able to keep some of your personal computers longer because you might not need as a robust computer if all of the work is being done on a server. Watch out for telecom costs though, especially if you don't have good bandwidth and stability with that bandwidth. If you're going to be moving to some cloud offerings, you need to have access, reliable access for your office. I would throw in that depending on what you're doing with the cloud, if you're using a service like Microsoft SpeedPos or Google Apps, I don't think this is important. But if you are taking your servers and moving them to a cloud location, often called co-location or something like that, you might want to look into managed bandwidth that allows you to prioritize the type of information that comes and goes. A popular thing right now is doing your voice over IP phone system as a hosted service. Instead of installing all that PBX hardware in your office. But again, you want to make sure that your bandwidth supports that and your voice calls aren't going to suffer because somebody is doing a big download. Here are just a couple of examples of the economics. You can see here, this is a big hotel. This might not apply directly to your situation, but they had $200,000 server refresh and $10,000 monthly recurring costs. When they moved to the cloud, they decreased that implementation cost to $10,000, but they did increase to $16,000 that monthly cost. Here is an example that I pulled from Microsoft actually, the Nevada Crisis Call Center. So this is a nonprofit like you guys. They were able to trim their technology management work by $20,000 annually. They eliminated a recurring capital expense of $15,000. An additional benefit was right here, they found that their services were more reliable. And for a Crisis Call Center, you need to have some reliable services. Great. Thanks, Anna and Peter. So we talked a little bit earlier about why cloud competing is green, but can you tell us a little bit more specifics about that? Sure. When you don't need to buy servers, that means that fewer servers are being built. Now you might question that statement, but think about it. The average server used by a small to medium-sized office is utilized at about 5%. And I think Tech Republic came up with that number. But these cloud offerings, their servers are often utilized at a much higher percentage, like 50 to 75% utilization. And they do that by putting many organizations on one server. So instead of having your standalone server, you've got, you're sharing a server. So that means fewer servers are built and running. Fewer toxic materials and water are used to build those, or ship those, to dump those. Less energy is consumed if computers or servers are used at a higher utilization. You don't have as many servers running and sucking up energy. And sometimes you can even get away with less powerful client computers. And that means that you can keep some of your computers longer. One of the examples I like to use is green website hosting. And here are some questions that you might want to discuss with your provider. If you're looking to switch website hosts, check out one of these lists of green web hosts. These are not web hosts themselves, but they are lists of green web hosts. So web hosting geeks has a great list that they are very popular, very well known. They have lists of green hosts. They have lists of the best hosts. And I believe when I last worked recently, seven of their green hosts were also listed in their top 10 best hosts. A lot of the costs are very comparable these days to the more traditional ones. Okay, great. So now we kind of have an understanding of what cloud computing is and how it can be green. Let's talk about some of the examples. And we've sent some information via the chat about some examples, Microsoft example. So can you tell us a little bit more about the examples of tools that are in the cloud? Sure. There are a wide variety of tools. And again, you'll want to assess carefully which are the right ones for you to use. And some of them like document sharing are a little easier to start up with than say a CRM solution. But here are a couple of examples, Office Live, Google Docs, Zoho, they do document sharing. And with a number of these, you can use them for free. There is no cost unless you want to do something more complex or bigger. CRM solutions, here are a few of the more well known providers who have been around for a while and may all have offerings in the cloud. Mozi for backup, and then as you know, social networking. There are a whole bunch of offerings here. Many of them are free or have pro versions if you want to get them. I'd point out a couple of things on this slide. When you're looking at the well-known document sharing solutions like Office Live and Google Docs, if you evaluated it a year ago and said word is so much more fuller featured than Google Docs is or any criticism of any of these, I would say look at them again. These are growing rapidly. They are adding features every month and it's kind of impressive how sophisticated all of them are getting. They are very competitive with each other, so they are all adding features every day. If you are looking at CRM, the caution I give is it's great to hear that Salesforce has 10 free licenses, but if you think they are free, think carefully about that. What most organizations and nonprofits found is that when they moved to Salesforce or Blackboard or Microsoft CRM, you really should look at hiring a consultant and being careful about how you go to that and investing some upfront money in it. Thanks, Peter. Here are also some tools for working specifically with distributed teams. Let's say you have a volunteer force or your staff is spread out. Here are some things, some cloud offerings that might really help you, some web conferencing, file sharing. These are more comprehensive, posted applications right here like the Office Productivity and Google Apps. Then there are project collaboration tools as well. For instance, Basecamp has, if you want one free project, nonprofits can get one free project from Basecamp. If you want more features and more projects then you need to start paying for it. But it's a nice, easy way to enter into the space. Here is a slide actually from Microsoft that details, it will be in a moment for you, that details some of their offerings. On the left hand side you can see where they have discounted offerings over here. And then on the right you can see some of their free cloud offerings. So I'd say check some of these out. See how well they work for you. And maybe you are already working using some of them. Then there are a couple more free or discounted offerings other than the Microsoft ones that we've recommended. Google Docs we've mentioned, Basecamp I've mentioned. Skype is a great way to do video conferencing or audio conferencing. And they have this new plug-in. I haven't personally tried it but others have and recommended it, View Room so that you can have I think it's up to 6 people on video chat. It's worth checking it out. And Dropbox is great for free document sharing between either your computer, your various personal computers in your phone or with your coworkers. Great. Moving right along to how these tools can be used. Anna, can you address how the tools are used? Sure. You really want to look at how you are using your software or your services. If you expect to have lots of on and off needs or you expect your services to grow quickly, you are expecting to onboard a bunch of volunteers or you have a fundraiser each year. You might look at cloud computing because the cloud can typically, not everyone, but typically handle these situations where you are not paying for this inactivity period or you are only paying for the amount that you are using. And their computers are the ones that need to scale, not yours. You don't need to worry about adding servers or adding load balancers but you let them worry about those situations. So some of the criteria that you might want to consider, these are more organization-specific criteria. Think about if you are just getting started, you probably don't want to put your mission critical apps in the cloud. Start smaller. But then look at maybe you need a mission critical app. Maybe that should be your first step if you need to have a distributed workforce get to your critical data. Just think very carefully about it. Do you need to have security certifications like HIPAA, Sarbanes, Oxley, anything like that? You want to look very carefully about what you need, what security certifications you need. We will talk about the vendors here in a moment. Your bandwidth, I was just in Montana and they said a lot of our rural places we don't even have dial-up. So if you don't have good, strong, reliable bandwidth, the cloud might not be for you. Or if you are going to move to the cloud, make sure you're considering your bandwidth needs as well. As Peter was just saying, make sure that your costs and IT skill sets are compatible with going to the cloud. Often for some easier things you don't need a whole lot of help but for some of the more complex things, if you're going to be using them extensively you might want to look at what that will mean for you. Like I said, if you have remote staff or volunteers, cloud is an interesting thing for you to consider. And if you have limited office space and you plan on expanding, that might force you to have more remote staff or volunteers. So that might be a reason for you to consider the cloud as well. And one intriguing opportunity I think for very small nonprofits is to look at saving rent and basically going officeless. The cloud is at a point now. These options like Microsoft's BPOS or Google Docs are easier for small organizations to adopt than large ones. Generally the larger organization the more integration you have with Exchange and things like that which make it more of a tricky thing to consider in a lengthy process to go to the cloud. But if you're very small you can look at where moving to the cloud will save you in other ways. So maybe the cloud costs are the same as doing it in-house but you no longer have to pay rent. That's an excellent point. So here are some questions to ask the vendors actually when you're considering working, either ask them personally or do some research. What are the costs? What are the upfront costs, ongoing costs? Is it a utility model? Is it a subscription model? So let's say you're paying per user per month which is a common way to do it. You want to stay on top of that. So if you're removing users you'll want to make sure that you're telling your vendor as well so that you're not paying for people who aren't using the system. Security and compliance, this is a big one for a lot of folks especially medical folks, anybody who has secured data and needs to comply with certain laws, go with the vendors who are certified, who are audited. You don't want to go with just somebody who has some neat features but you need to make sure that they meet your standards and the law standards. Reliability and SLA's, like Peter said, you don't want somebody who's got it all running on their box in their basement and if they go down, you go down. You want to make sure that you have a good SLA that they are reliable. A lot of the big names already have that, the Microsoft, the Google, the Amazon. You can rely on them to be very reliable and have a lot of uptime. But look carefully at the SLA's. And then of course don't forget about the features and ease of startup. They are a good match for your organization. Here we have an example, or we will in a moment, of some service level agreement things to think about. NIST, I got this slide from NIST and here's going to their presentation. But they'll talk about SLA's and they talk about security as well. And you want to make sure that your SLA's contain performance metrics, the uptime, the throughput, the response time, and more especially for you, what does the problem management look like? How are they going to respond to you if you have a problem with your offering? Make sure you understand that before you move there. Excellent. Now the challenges, I know that there's a lot of great questions. We'll be getting to questions in about 5 minutes or so. And if you could tell us what some of the concerns or challenges are related to working in the cloud? Sure thing. This is a poll that was done by IDC. And as you can see, they list the top three things that their readers were concerned about as security, performance, and availability. Those are going to hold true for nonprofits as well. So what are some of the risks of being in the cloud? Loss of connectivity. If you don't have the good reliable bandwidth, or if the provider is not mature enough, do you have to worry about their connectivity? Service levels, what sort of service can you expect? The regulatory compliance, are they certified? Are they audited? They should be able to provide that information to you. And backups, all of the big names, as Peter mentioned, they have live duplicate copies of your stuff. They have it on two servers in two different places across the country or the world, but you need to make sure that you have access and copies of your data so that if you go down, or if something happens, you can get access to your data. And think carefully about security. A lot of these bigger name organizations, the Amazons, Googles, Microsoft, they have teams of people who do security. They are also targets often for hackers, but they have the specialists. And like Peter said, they can do security generally a whole lot better than we are smiling nonprofits with limited staff, IP staff who have to do a little bit of everything, often they can be more secure. So I know what I find is that one of the challenges I didn't see listed in that chart was the challenge of convincing your management that cloud computing is a good idea. Because your boss, your three bosses at TechSoup are pretty tech savvy. My CEO, very smart guy, not really up on the trends. So I find that a great conversation to have when they ask you, tell you, we can't put our data on the cloud. It's insecure is, well, wait a minute, they have the people with all the degrees and significance in it, you've got me, and framing it that way. And I wanted to quickly add on the backups and access to data, and this isn't even strictly a cloud concern. I think it's concern with any database. You need to make sure when you're negotiating that contract for the service that you have full access to your data. And that means more than just being able to access data and backups. But they can't have a little rider in there saying something, and I've been in this situation where a vendor told me that we were not allowed to do mass updates on our information in the database because they were worried that it would cause some problem for them. Not being able to do mass updates became a tremendous problem for us when we had to do a couple of different projects. One involved integrating with another system. So just make sure kind of my mantra is you own your data and you can do whatever you need to do with your data. And if their contract applies otherwise, you need to negotiate. That's fantastic. Great point, Peter. Now we'll talk just a couple of minutes about cloud security. Here are a few things to think about. We'll get into these in more detail in a moment, but trust, do you trust the vendor? Multi-tenancy, like I said, a lot of them are putting multiple clients on one server. If they're mature and robust, you don't have to worry about it. But if they're not, you might have to worry a bit. Is your data encrypted? And are they compliant with, you know, HIPAA, Sylvain, Fox, whatever you need to be compliant with? Yeah, very quick. There are two multi-tenancy concerns. One is, can another customer on the server see your information? Another is, can another customer on the server do something that ties up the whole server and degrades your access to your information? So those are the things you need to make sure that they have good things in their SLAs covering. And here are some of the general security advantages. Again, from Nest, and they really have a wonderful PowerPoint presentation, but it is a little geeky. So I think it's worth a look though. Shifting public data to an external cloud reduces the exposure of the internal sensitive data. The security auditing and testing is simpler because their systems are audited once as opposed to all the clients getting audited individually. The automated security management often may give you tools to be able to adjust your security, your specific security, and redundancy and disaster recovery. Some general challenges that you need to look out for when moving to the cloud, let's let this update here, do trust, again back to the trusting vendor security model. They should be able to show you that they have a good security model. Customer inability to respond to audit findings. Now here's a third party who you have to work through, obtaining support for investigations. Are they going to be there if your data is getting audited? Do you need to rely on them or not? Indirect administrative accountability. They're not as accountable if you're the one getting audited. So what's in the SLA? What's in your contract to make sure that you're getting your needs met? Proprietary implementations can't be examined and loss of physical control. So you don't actually have the box for the server itself. For some folks, that's quite scary. And here is a slide, a great slide from Microsoft that I think summarizes the debate. If it's internal, you might have more security and privacy, customizability, visibility and control, and data accessibility. But again, I think both Peter and I would question the security, especially if you're a small shop. Whereas if you're going to the cloud, you've got more global reach, ease of provisioning, visibility, deployability, and manageability. You can do these things a lot more on your own without needing as much technical support. Very good. So thanks so much for both presenters. This is a lot of information. And we've sent some messages on the chat from folks who are saying this is a little bit over my head. We do have a blog post that will explain much of the basics. I'm sending that link via the chat. It will be included in the message I sent out this afternoon. So for those of you who feel like you're dizzy from all this information, start there. Come back, watch the webinar recording. Pass it on to other people at your organization. What I want to do is spend some time now asking the presenters some questions that have come through on the chat. So I'm going to start with, I know the privacy and security is a concern. So I wanted to go back and see, is the data compromised in any way? Do you have any recommendations that people do have very confidential information? What is the best practice for them when they want to host their information in the cloud? So what I would say on that is, kind of repeating what we said earlier, you really have to talk with the cloud vendor and understand what their security is and how well they're protecting it. I know for a fact that Salesforce has very good security that nobody is going to see your data up there, but I'm not sure about some other vendors. What I always say about security in the cloud is that what people tend to do is say, ooh, cloud's scary. These are the things that are scary about the cloud. They identify a bunch of things that like privacy concerns that are valid, but also look at what you have today and compare it and do the same analysis on not cloud. For many of us, we have small IT staff. They haven't got the bandwidth to put in good firewalls and good protection on their own systems. We all know the stories of people who maintain sensitive data and have their password on, posted on their monitor. So we have to kind of compare and say, what's the risk with the way I'm doing it today? What would be the risk if I go to this particular cloud service with these assurances and their service level agreements and make that the basis for the decision? There are certainly cases where nonprofits deal with the type of information that they just cannot afford to put it up on a server. And I think really what comes in here is that if the cloud service is subpoenaed, what are they going to do with the information? That's one of the tests where maybe the cloud might fail no matter how good their security is. And are there any vendors who in their license agreement make the data belong to the vendor? If there are, I wouldn't sign up with them. And how would you know? Is this something that you just read closely in the service agreement? Yes, this needs to be spelled out in the contract. Okay, and that's not something you've heard of happening. I actually haven't heard of that happening. I'm not sure if I have. I have had situations with vendors, as I said before, who told me what I couldn't do with my data on their system. And that ended up being an embedment to my ability to do what I need to do for my organization. So again, you want to have it spelled out what access you have to your data. The basics are you need to be able to download all of your data to your local systems at any time. And you had mentioned there's a discussion from Gail that said you talked about checking vendors for certification. Is there a place where we can find this information? How can they look up that certification? Most of these vendors should have it posted on their websites or it should be in the contract. Also, if they claim that they're certified then they need to have been audited by someone. So you can check out who did the audit to verify. And it would really depend on industry specific if there are sites out there that list certified providers. But I wouldn't expect to find a whole lot of clearinghouses like that, but talk to the vendor and then you can follow their audit trail. Usually somebody like PricewaterhouseCoopers, somebody like that, a big auditing firm that will certify these guys. And there's a comment and a question from Terry. People should keep in mind that service levels need to include support. And the question is what level of support do you get with the service if you have a technical problem? And that's going to vary from organization to organization and how some organizations have IT departments that are going to be able to help you through some doubt. And the question from Patrick, Peter mentioned the benefits of cloud computing for small organizations. What size organizations do you consider small, Peter? So I have a big opinion on that which is that if you have 20 or less people in your organization and you have a full Microsoft Network and Exchange server, you're probably overdoing it. And you'd be better off in the cloud unless there is some really good reason not to be on the cloud. And this is a number that's changing. And I did a session on cloud computing last spring and got asked, well, why isn't my organization heavily in the cloud? Because we aren't. I work for an organization with about 180 people in 10 offices. So we're a little bigger than probably most of the nonprofits here. And so in our organization we have our fundraising databases very tightly integrated with our Exchange server and Active Directory. So what we determined was we would lose important functionality if we went to the cloud at the time we evaluated. But as I said before, this is all changing rapidly. And I know for a fact that Microsoft's offerings are getting more sophisticated and even reaching the point where they can integrate with a locally installed Windows Network so that the user accounts are all there, not in the cloud in your local server but the cloud system can access them and do security and provide access based on them. So it's rapidly changing. It's simpler for smaller organizations that don't have complex networks today. That 20 number I threw out, maybe it's already 30. It's going to get easier and easier the larger you are as these offerings get more sophisticated. And I would say just to make sure everybody understands that 20 or 30 number that Peter is throwing out, if you're in an office of 1 or 2 or 10, it's up to the 20 or 30 number. So if you're in an office of 1 to 20 or 30, you probably don't need an in-house email server. You might look through a cloud offering for that. So very small organizations can take advantage. I know some consultants who only have offerings in the cloud or have their entire office in the cloud because they're so small, they don't have the needs of having their own personal servers. And to my mind, it's such an easy evaluation. If you were paying a consultant to come in and manage your email server, we talked a lot about how it might be cost-neutral to pay the fees to have a cloud service versus pay the upfront costs to buy the hardware and software, but saving money on the maintenance is a definite opportunity. And there's a question about as our organization grows, are there any cloud computing vendors that can adapt to that growth? Do you have any best practices around kind of how do you change as your organization grows? Cloud is actually ideally suited for dealing with growth whether rapid or small because you're paying per use. You're paying for how much you consume generally. So if you need to add more seats, you can do that quite easily. So you just need to do the cost-benefit analysis for you and your organization. If you go from 20 people to 100 people and you're paying $10 per month per user, what is your monthly ongoing cost going to look like versus an upfront cost of having a server built that can support those 100 people upfront? You should look carefully at those numbers. But yeah, I'd say cloud is good to support growth. The cloud services that know what they're doing have server farms with more capacity than they have clients today so that they are available for that type of growth. I mean, I just second that. They're far more likely to be easily scalable than your internal resources because generally we buy what we need because that's all we can afford. And there's a question from Betty. She says, I find it complicated to keep track of all my logins and passwords. Are there tools for managing them? I'll mention that I do something personally and then we do something as an organization. There is free and or very inexpensive password management software which are applications that you can go in and have different categories for different types of websites or servers or cloud services or whatever and store all that information in one password protected encrypted place. So we definitely do that at our organization. And then I have a very similar app on my smartphone that I carry with me because I've got over 200 accounts just personally that I need to keep track of and having a program that does it. I see in the chat that somebody mentioned LastPass. That's a popular one that Kevin just did. And we'll be sure to send out some links to those tools in the post-event message. So we are about ready to wrap up. Are there any last kind of comments before we move on to the conclusion that the presenters wanted to make? Well, there was one last question that I'll ask then about the security and the backup capabilities. So I know that with, you mentioned that Google has several servers and things are very much backed up, but in general is that something, how mindful do we have to be about their backup capabilities? I see two separate things. One is that you do need to ask before you sign up with the service what their backup procedure is. Make sure that they are either replicating the data the way Google does or taking nightly or real-time backups of information so that if they have some kind of crisis they can restore. And then the second question is, can you do your own backups? Because personally for any critical service I would still want to have a copy of my data in-house for that worst case scenario. And I mean, you hope for the best, prepare for the worst. I do think that most viable cloud services even if they are in threat of going under if they have a large number of critical customers, somebody is going to buy them, the service will continue. It's not all that dangerous, but you do want to keep a local backup of your data. Well that is all the time we have. I'm going to turn it back over to Anna to do a little wrap up. Thanks, Kimmy. So as I've said throughout, you want to be very careful when you are doing this. The cloud has a lot to offer, especially small nonprofits and libraries. Cloud solutions are often greener and easier to implement and often in certain situations more secure, but cloud solutions are not right for every need or every organization. So you should take careful steps, evaluate what some of your options are for moving to the cloud. I'd say test it out. Look at the options you have and get your folks comfortable whether you are an IT person trying to convince your organization or you are an ED or a staff person in a library or a nonprofit and trying to convince your IT folks. Take a small step. Talk with your board, your staff, your volunteers, your consultants and say, what is the best first step for us? Maybe you do have a critical need. That means you have to jump right now to get your mission critical stuff into the cloud. But I would hold off on some of the mission critical stuff at first. Get your feet wet, make sure you work out the kinks, and then have a plan for implementing a broader cloud strategy. Well, that is great. Thank you so much, Anna. So on this slide we've got the contact information for both speakers. And again, you will get a copy of this presentation in a few hours from me along with a link to the recording and the audio file and other links that we discussed during the webinar. Here's some links to additional resources that we have on the TechSoup site. And these are all clickable. So when you open up your presentation, you'll have access to the URL. But again, I'll include this in my post-event message. And if you have additional questions that didn't get answered, please post those to our community forums. I submitted that via the chat a second ago, and I will do that again right there. And some upcoming webinars that we have next week is Story of an Open Source Library. It's a very interesting branch of libraries on the East Coast that are almost all on open source. And then the following week, SecurityBasics, Keep Your Computer Safe, some more of a basic webinar. And we would like to thank ReadyTalk. This webinar is made possible by ReadyTalk which has donated the use of their system to help TechSoup expand awareness of technology throughout the nonprofit sector. ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the U.S. and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services. So again, I'd like to thank everyone for participating in today's webinar. And the presenters, thank you so much, Anna and Peter, for your time and your expertise. I also want to let you know that in the PowerPoint there's an appendix that has a few more slides with more security information that we didn't have time to get into today, but be sure to check out the PowerPoint. So if you have any additional questions, be sure to email me. Take a minute to complete our post-it and survey, and certainly do appreciate everyone's time. Have a wonderful day. Thanks, presenters. Thanks, Anna. Thanks, Peter. Thanks, Kimmy, Anna, Anna. Thank you, the whole team. Bye-bye. Thank you. Please stand by.