Even those of us in the IT industry are still vunerable to cyber crime. Just today I recieved a phone call from my bank informing me that "there's been a lot of transactions on your debit card this weekend" and "I assume you didn't buy an Egypt Air ticket from Cairo to..." [wherever]. Needless to say, I wasn't impressed and it prompted me to re-evaluate my own situation and write this article.

So, just how do you protect yourself in this day and age where you're most likely needing to perform some degree of internet based purchasing? In my line of work (running a small IT consultancy) where I supply hardware and software to customers and purchase a lot of niche tools that I use to run my business (largely from US based companies), sometimes I have no choice but to transact business over the internet.

You can't visit a IT product or service related website these days without seeing some mention of the "cloud". It's the latest buzzword in the IT industry and it seems everyone is getting on the bandwagon - even Apple with their latest iCloud announcement. With all of these "clouds" around, it's sometimes hard to see where you're going. In this article, we'll try and clear-up some of the confusion and put some sunshine back in your life.

So what is this "cloud" thing anyway?

Before I can explain what the cloud is, we need to understand a little bit about the market. Before the internet hit the masses, everything was on-premise. You had your own Servers and PCs and you bought either shrink-wrapped software (like MYOB or Microsoft Office) or an expensive niche application that came with it's own entourage of pre-sales, business and technical consultants (think SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle Financials - all designed for the enterprise).

There's no right answer to this question, but there are plenty of wrong answers. We'll try and provide you with a balanced view and some key considerations that you need to take into account before you decide what the right answer is for your business.

We're going to make some assumptions here before we start:

• you've selected the applications that you need to run your business and you're now choosing the infrastructure to run it on.
• you have sufficient in-house skills to manage the IT environment or you've negotiated a good Managed Services agreement with a local provider.

The first thing you need to decide on is what are the most important components of your new infrastructure and where will they be located. Some considerations are: