What Every Nonprofit Needs to Know about Cloud Computing

Grazed from NonProfitQuarterly. Author: John Hoffman.

Today marks the kickoff of Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce conference, which the company bills as “the cloud computing industry event of the year.” Cloud computing, or the use of the Internet to run applications and store data, emerged in the early 2000’s. After the dot.com bubble burst, surviving and newer companies, like Salesforce, Google, Amazon and others, moved from using the Internet as a medium to place orders or communicate with customers and instead developed online platforms that leveraged Internet connectivity as a crucial part of their services. Today, cloud computing has become so ubiquitous that many people are unaware they are even using it.

TechSoup Global recently released a report that surveyed more than 10,000 NGO’s across 88 countries to measure their adoption of cloud computing. “People often don’t know whether or not the technology they are using is cloud computing” says Marnie Webb, Co-CEO of TechSoup Global. “It’s only when we asked respondents about specific technologies that we discovered that they were, in fact, using cloud computing.”…

The report found that 90 percent of survey respondents were using cloud computing in some way, and that more than half said they plan to move a significant portion of their IT to the cloud within three years. “At the enterprise level, after organizations use more than three cloud-based tools, that becomes the tipping point at which they decide to move a significant portion of their IT onto the cloud.” says Webb. “Once they start using cloud computing tools the benefits start to increase their motivation, because they have more experience with it.”…

Read more from the source @ http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/management/21020-what-every-nonprofit-needs-to-know-about-cloud-computing.html