'Cloudsourced' Solutions

Jason Gosselin wrote wrote about some of the questions that need to be considered when a company weighs the advantages and disadvantages of cloud based solutions. A perfect example is Google Apps, for $50 per user per year you can get all of the Googley goodness for your employees.

Samara Lynn, writing for ChannelWeb, just posted a good article looking into the security aspect. Is it worth it for businesses to give up the top level security control of their email, that is putting a lot of trust in Google.

I would argue that the ease of set up is well worth it to small businesses that don't have large security concerns. I see any finance, health care and legal businesses staying away for now, but for the thousands of other small businesses, Google Apps seems like a great solution.

Oakland Community College recently rolled out a student email service utilizing Google Apps, and the student response seems to be positive.

I definitely see a trend of more and more applications moving towards the 'cloudsourcing' model, but it is not a one size fits all solution for sure.