Cloud and MS ACCESS

[waynemedic]

Hi all,

I have been designing MS Access databased for my clients.
They are now asking me to put their database onto the cloud.
Please would anyone share light on the most efficient and cost effective cloud websites to use and the best way to go forward at this point.

Thanx
Wayne

 

[Provogeek]

This is a difficult question to answer with the forum rules of no promoting or selling.

My first thought on this would be to look for an Office 365 provider, but I do not know how your customers wants to access the MS Access database. I would look for a provider that also gave you shared storage, so the DB can be stored in the cloud and access by multiple people of the same organization. In many cases, you may want your customer to go get the 365 account them selves. If you provide the account, you will need to manage that aspect of your business as well as the DB development (but it could be another revenue stream for you). There are also providers that will just let you rent a virtual desktop, or even a group of virtual desktops. One of the types of projects I have been getting a lot lately for small businesses is to migrate their entire infrastructure to the cloud. All servers and workstations get removed as the organization moves to the cloud.

As far as a company? there really are too many to give a decent recommendation on. I would suggest you start your search using the partner locator from VMWare, Microsoft, or Citrix. They all have a portal that will help you find a solutions provider that uses their software. Make sure the company you go with has a minimum of 4 on staff certified engineers on what ever platform they use. VMWare, Microsoft, & Citrix all have their certification paths. A cloud solutions provider should have 4 on staff certified engineers at a minimum. Anything less and you can run into support issues due to the fact that engineers are human, not robots. You can even ask to see those engineers resumes. It is not unusual, I have to provide mine to new customers often. I would also make sure they have a DR site, and that DR site is located properly. DR sites should also be no less than 100 miles apart, any closer and you run the chance of a natural disaster taking both sites down at the same time. If they only have one building to host from, they may not be the best choice.

If all your doing is building custom databases for your customers and just delivering those customer database, then you may be able to get away with a tool like DropBox. They can then retrieve the database when you make it available, or get another copy easily when needed with out bothering you.



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Brent Schmidt Senior Network Engineer
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http://www.kiscc.com

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[dilettante]

You need to be more clear what you need here.

It sounds like you have created an Access application, with Forms, Reports, etc. While you could link from an Access "front end" (which would need to be installed onto each client system) to a SQL Server, etc. "back end" located in the cloud I doubt you can just shove your existing Access application onto some cloud sevice.

Whether using Jet or ACE as your current datastore, neither is practical to put on a cloud service. These require remote filesystem access between the client piece and the datastore, and performance would be pretty bad. You'd need to move to a client-server DBMS backend.

Of course if you have a monolithic "Access application" they want to download and run locally, well then you just want a file sharing service. Which (despite the marketing hype) isn't really "cloud" anything.

If they want this to be more broadly available you might have to convert it to an Access Web application, which just becomes a sort of web app, and again: no "cloud" involved.

Could be Office 365 might offer you something, see

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/a...ata-to-access-and-office-365-HA102610172.aspx

and/or

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/o...ccess-database-to-sharepoint-HA102435342.aspx

However there is no "cloud" here either.


Just sticking something on a remote server is not cloud computing.