Paul Reid asks what cloud computing means for field work

Over the past five years cloud computing has moved from being the domain of early adopters to providing mainstream systems architecture for major corporations. 

The benefits of remotely hosting and serving business applications and services via the internet ‘cloud’ continue to be debated in organisations around the world.

Those in favour stress the cost benefits that can be realised by renting server capacity from a third party hosting service. Those against raise concerns about the security and reliability of infrastructure that is not internally controlled.

Critics of cloud computing had a field day this April when a failure in Amazon’s EC2 Cloud Services platform forced a number of businesses that rely on this technology to put up closed signs while the Amazon engineers figured out how to get systems back online. 

Regardless of your take on the technology and how it fits yourspecific organisational needs, the event has highlighted both the inherent risks associated with building critical business processes around online services and the need for proper contingency planning.

When building solutions for your mobile workers, reliability is key. The very nature of field work usually means that staff don’t have access to the same level of support as their office-based colleagues. And if your core mobile working solutions are unavailable for any length of time, it may not be possible to simply move on to the next task; the system may not be able to tell what or where the next job is.

‘Work Anywhere’ is a phrase we use to describe one of the key design principles of our GeoField solutions: the core toolset must function reliably regardless of communications availability and the status of your office-based infrastructure. From day one, GeoField has been engineered to work independently of your enterprise systems, with core operational datasets stored locally on the mobile device and updated when a connection becomes available. With GeoField, your field workers will always be ready for business.