Clearpoint

Living In The Cloud – the Server-less dream

Posted by Phil Pietersen on 18 November 2009 | 1 Comments

Tags: SaaS, PSA, professional services, cloud, serverless

With our planning for Christmas hols in full swing, including how we will do invoicing and payment processing whilst on holiday, it made me think about how well our “server-less” IT infrastructure is working for us. We have been using these “cloud” or SaaS apps (call them what you will) for nearly 3 years now and have learnt a lot and refined our usage over time with experience.

 

A snapshot of what we use:

Xero – for financials ( www.xero.com ). It’s easy to use and perfectly suits a services based organisation of our size.

OpenAir – for time, project and client management ( www.openair.com ). Covers all our Professional Services Automation (PSA) needs.

ASB Bank Fastnet Business – for AP’s & all banking.

Google Apps – for email, calendar, intranet, shared google docs, IM.

Microsoft Groove – for serverless peer to peer file sharing – works very well for up to 5000 files and 2GB storage.

Dropbox – for web based file sharing and project artefact collaboration complete with full versioning ( www.dropbox.com ).

 

Hanging off our wireless LAN is HP colour laser, and a NAS storage device as part of our backup architecture.

And all our associates provide their own laptops, to whatever specification they wish.

 

So therefore we don't require file & print servers... at all.

 

The design is not by accident either – when we setup ClearPoint we wanted to challenge what business infrastructure we would need for an IT services pure player. And buying loads of desktops, servers and network gear that quickly depreciates was something we wanted to avoid.

 

We are looking to see how we can scale this design as our headcount is now around 45+ people with many more having a ClearPoint email address. So far so good.

 

We often find ourselves debating design and comparing tips & tricks, and what has and has not worked for us, with our friends in the industry who have taken a similar approach. The Google / Microsoft debate rages on.

 

So anyway, when it comes to planning the “who”, “when” and “where” for the Christmas finance possessing, at least the “how” is taken care of – all we need is an internet connection and our ASB RSA token, and we are sorted.