Blue Ridge Technology

Can your business go green by switching to the cloud? While it isn’t a universal solution that makes sense in every single situation, switching to the cloud can deliver all sorts of benefits to many businesses. But what about its effect on your carbon footprint? Does a cloud migration help you go green, or does it just shift the ecological burden around? If you’re concerned about your environmental impact and are looking at your network and IT environment in that light, here’s what you need to know about the cloud. The Cloud and the Environment If you’re running everything in-house, you can probably get a read on how much your servers and so on are costing you. You can measure the electricity, and that’s a pretty good start. Yes, there are other environmental considerations, like how the hardware you’re using was made, but we’ll set those aside for a moment. Sometimes there’s this idea that moving to the cloud makes those impacts go away. The short answer: that’s not how this works. Mo...

Make sure your cloud server is protected from this Here at Blue Ridge Technology, we’re big fans of the cloud. Cloud technologies can unlock so much potential for today’s businesses: file storage and even applications that can be accessed from anywhere, software tools that don’t have to be installed or updated on everyone’s laptops, and access to computing power to do seriously cool things that SMBs likely couldn’t afford to do on their own servers. For nerds like us, there’s plenty to geek out about with the cloud. But there are some security dangers associated with the cloud (at least, with using the cloud poorly), and we want our readers to know about them. Is the Cloud Secure? A whole lot of people have the idea that the cloud is less safe than the alternative. After all, if you’re putting all your sensitive data “out there” on the internet, isn’t it easier for the bad guys to steal? Hang with us for a second: while this is sort of exactly what we want to warn you about, it’s still...