A number of people have asked us in the last week how TurnKey Cloud compares to the soon to release Apple iCloud.  The short answer is they are 2 very different products, and 2 very different outlooks towards the future and uses of ‘The Cloud’.

 First let’s cover What Is The Cloud : The Cloud is IT on Demand. The cloud is a scalable, reliable and cost-effective way of accessing information technology at any time from anywhere. The technology of the cloud revolves around the benefits of moving expensive and complicated IT out of your office into an efficient, scalable, and secure datacenter.

 Apple’s iCloud focuses on just storing and sharing data (photos, videos, music, contacts, calendar, address book, and application data such as a document, spread sheet or configuration file) while constantly transmitting that data back and forth to the device of your choosing (such as an iPhone, Mac desktop, Mac laptop, or an iPad).  All the computer processing power and applications run on the specific device, and are limited by the memory, cpu and operating system software of that particular device.  If you want to work on a document, you need the word processor application installed on your iPhone, and your Desktop, and your iPad so it can run the application and read the data. Your data is constantly transmitted back and forth between your devices, synchronizing back to Apple’s central datacenter(s), so it enjoys the benefits of being stored off-site and available in case one of your devices was damaged or lost. 

 One of the downsides of the Apple iCloud design is that you are tied into their applications and platform – if you have employees on the road using blackberry, droid or other mobile devices they wont be integrated as closely into the data that is shared via iCloud.  Another downside in this model, is if you need to run an application that requires large amounts of memory, or cpu power – you are limited to the maximum capacity of the device you are using from Apple.  Need to crunch some numbers in your spread sheet, you can’t go faster than the processor of your device – there is no way to expand the cpu or speed.

With TurnKey Cloud you get the same storage and sharing benefits similar to Apple iCloud such as geographic redundancy, off site backups, best practices security and redundancy for your data.  The key difference of TurnKey Cloud  is that all the applications run inside the cloud, and you can access them via any device without being limited to a specific device brand.  For instance with TurnKey Desk Virtual Desktop   you can run a copy of Microsoft Office 2010, and access the entire computing platform from an iPad, iphone, blackberry, home or office PC, etc.  Where you can not normally run an application such as Microsoft Office on an apple device such as an iPhone, through the TurnKey Desk Virtual Desktop you can now universally access the same applications and data from any device, any where, at any time.

With TurnKey Cloud – our datacenter(s) are where your IT equipment, office servers, desktop applications, web applications, business software and data can all be accessed easily, at a much lower cost, and securely via the Internet.  You can access this information from any device, and when you need more speed, memory or space you can instantly scale to the size you need since the computing resources are entirely in the cloud, and not limited or tied to the cpu processing of the device you are using to access the application.

  The Cloud is all about universal access to your data, from anywhere – and while both Apple’s iCloud and TurnKey Cloud have the same goal – only TurnKey Cloud gives you the ultimate flexibility to run your applications, and access your data today across any platform, or device.