In preparation for the new year, what are you doing to erase digital illiteracy in your company? The world is changing quickly, and companies who don’t know about common tech concepts like cloud computing, virtualization and big data management are going to be left behind.
To help companies become more knowledgeable about cloud computing, the cloud hosting company Rackspace is offering cloud education curriculum. You owe it to yourself to sign up for Rackspace’s CloudU so you can prepare your organization to use cloud backup services for the rest of 2013. If you’re already using cloud hosting, you still owe it to yourself to actually understand the product so you can get the most out of it and make the right choices for your business.
 
About CloudU
Rackspace Cloud University, also referred to as CloudU, is a cloud education curriculum that is vendor-agnostic. It’s not designed to sell you on any specific cloud services company, but rather to educate users about the viability and usefulness of transitioning some or all of your computing resources to the cloud.
CloudU was developed by industry analyst Ben Kepes as a way to showcase how this rapidly developing technology is making it easier for SMBs to compete in the same space as larger companies in the tech sphere.
People who design cloud-computing services have to keep scalability foremost in their mind, as the number of users could grow exponentially at any moment. A software developer could write an application and then see it being used all over the world in a matter of days if it helps people work more productively and efficiently. CloudU will give you the knowledge you need to take advantage of cloud backup services for your organization.
 
Get Educated About the Cloud
When you work through CloudU’s curriculum, you’ll learn about the technical aspects of cloud computing and find out different ways that it can help your organization remain nimble and competitive.
In case you need Cloud 101, the term “the cloud” refers to a computing infrastructure spread out over many servers via the Internet. Companies can use cloud computing to store their data and to perform off-site backups. Cloud computing also enables a business to run applications from distant servers instead of having to purchase this software for use on its own computers.
One of the benefits of using cloud resources is that you don’t have to worry about updating the software or burdening your IT department with patches or troubleshooting. These services are performed by the cloud service provider for you.
Cloud computing is typically more efficient than using your own company’s servers because the cloud computing service provider is maximizing the use of each of its servers.
Your business may have idle computers one week, and then find itself needing to purchase more to keep up with a change in work flow or to tackle a new big data mining project, for example. It’s far easier for you to simply arrange to use more cloud computing services as your needs change than to buy and maintain your own equipment.
 
CloudU will also teach you the benefits of cloud computing for your company’s disaster plans. You could set things up so that even if there is a lengthy power failure or a hurricane affecting your location, you’ll still have access to your data and any applications you might need to keep your business running, while competitors who don’t use the cloud are left to wait for repair teams to reach their facility.
After you go through the curriculum of CloudU, your company will be better poised to take advantage of the promise of cloud computing, giving you automatic offsite backups, worry-free hosting and access to software on demand from any location.