The speed at which computers infiltrated the business world was astonishing; one of the leaps in technological evolution. The theory was that since all the documents could be represented digitally, we would soon have no need for paper copies of anything. The savings savings in paper, ink, filing cabinets and personnel to handle them would be exceptional. Now we are entering the era of cloud hosting.

The changes on the horizon, including cloud computing, now promise to allow corporations to use the World Wide Web in even more exciting ways. The computer made many older methods of conducting enterprise obsolete; even car repair facilities are computerized. This paradigm shift can substantially alter the way workers use computer programs.

The office of yore always had a filing cabinet full of records set up in a complicated but regulated manner, and as time passed the storage became a pretty big issue. The transition to electronic records was supposed to eliminate such space and storage problems, unfortunately, they just changed format. Data continues to aggregate in exponential fashion, and storage, protection and security remain problematic.

The notion that we would ever see a time when we would need more storage for electronic files was not intuitively obvious early on, but new technology always has unintended consequences. Similarly, no one could have predicted the incessant attack of malware on networks. Memory too, is a growing problem, the more there is available, the more complex and memory hungry the programs become.

The office suites of software have truly made complex problems much easier to solve, but these programs had to be replicated on every desktop for standardization. Unfortunately, the work accomplished was also individual, with true collaboration still not quite reachable. Now the capability is being introduced, and it is taking the commercial world by storm.

But as with any new toy, it is an expensive, time-consuming and risky affair to conduct a trial run with real information. Simulations can only go so far, the test should be robust and demonstrate a storage and data retrieval process to handle peak operational demand. Ease of access for every worker simultaneously, one of the goals of the new process, should be challenged.

Given the opportunity to evaluate a dramatically different way to use the internet and conduct business, companies should work diligently to investigate how the technology will solve their problems. The cost in capital and the setback to progress during the implementation make the effort an opportunity to discover the real impact of the new programming capabilities. There must also be assurances that reliability and security concerns are under control.

The only way to be sure that a cloud server will provide the progress expected is to try it for real. Before spending the money and time and subjecting all employees to a completely new process a complete evaluation is critical. Success or failure is measured by how easily employees can continue doing their jobs, what improvements to processes are demonstrated, how safe and secure the data is, and finally if the company actually saves money.