I have just spent a lovely 4 days in the Dumfries and Galloway area of Scotland. Lovely beaches, lovely people and even the weather played nice (for the most part). This area has very few population centres with Dumfries being the largest with roughly 30,000 people. Ideal for a holiday then but what about working down here. If you are a business in these parts I would guess you won’t be embracing the cloud very much, unless you have an office in one of the few population centres, and the reason? Mobile signal is shockingly bad.
Between myself, my wife and the inlaws we had 3 networks – O2, EE and Virgin and none of them had any internet connectivity worth shouting about. If you are a business in these parts that needs to be online while out and about you are going to struggle.
I had this exact conversation with someone at a networking event earlier in the week. My stance was that no connectivity = no internet while theirs was there is always someway to get online, whether it be coffee shops, Macdonalds, mobile coverage etc. I can see their point but but unless you can actually get to a Starbucks, Cafe Nero etc you will have no wifi down here. It was the same when I went to the Western Isles last year. The mobile coverage out there was even worse.
If you have an office with good broadband then going for cloud based solutions does make sense. If you work near a big population centre with coffee shops etc that have free wifi and also good mobile phone coverage again cloud does make sense. If you work in a remote area then cloud is not such a good idea.
Anyone work in remote areas and use cloud based solutions? I would love to hear how.
About the Author
Hi I’m Chris Wakefield the owner of ComTech IT Support. I provide Windows, Mac and Linux based IT Support to small businesses in Stirling, Alloa and Falkirk.
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Dougie who provides the satellite connections?
Hi,
My company has locations in the Western Isles and West coast of Scotland where mobile reception is awful. This has proven problematic for use, we use Vodafone as they have the best coverage in the UK for remote locations (to the best of my knowledge). We do get reception, enough for calls and texts but not internet, things are slowly improving, Stornoway on Lewis now gets a solid 3G signal, but it’s not really going to happen other places. We do use some Three 3G dongles for internet access at some points in the Western Isles and they seem to be effective.
Where possible we have ADSL on sites and people remotely work through Citrix (and we’re in the process of migrating to Office365 – so hopefully we’ll be relocating a lot of document storage to the that). For sites without ADSL, we have installed satellite connections, which work well, though due to high latency are not suitable for VPN connections.
The moving to Office365 to use SharePoint as a document storage library is a big part of it for us, however it will be interesting if in the next couple of years a couple of the SQL apps we use such as Navision (currently running over Citrix) transition over to Azure, that would be excellent if they did and worked speedy and reliably.
I hope this helps.
Thanks
Dougie