Jeff Bell Blog

Capex vs. Opex - The Costs of Storing Your Data One of the great debates in cloud computing involves business economics and the inherent expense that stocking and running a data center entails.  You may even hear the phrase "Capex vs Opex" in this debate.  This phrase refers to the trade-offs of investing in building and operating your own data center (Capital Expenditure and Operating Expenditure) versus using someone else’s data center (Operating Expenditure) on a pay-as-you-go or rental model.  It's important to consider the financial implications of both approaches in the long run - especially since “renting” costs less in the short term, but the investments in data centers will ultimately be passed on to the end users, making that approach more expensive.   Owning and stocking a physical data center requires capital expenditure (Capex), large amounts of space filled with computer hardware, and the cash flow to pay the power bill.  Many "cloud-based" d...

You may have heard by now that Digital Lifeboat offers cloud-based online backup systems . But you’re probably wondering just what is “the cloud” and how is it better than backing up to an external hard drive, for example? Let’s start with how your PC works. You open an application, like Microsoft Word, and you type a letter, and save the content on your hard drive. The application (Word) and the data (your letter) are on your PC. Cloud computing is an approach which involves the creation and deployment of services and applications over the internet, supported by a coordinated infrastructure. When you open your email, the application is “in the cloud” and when you send the email to a friend, the email is stored “in the cloud.” Lots of services like search engines, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook operate this way. The popular buzzword, “cloud” simply means storing digital files on someone else’s computer and accessing it by internet. What people like about “the cloud” is that they can...