Using the cloud to broker small-business outsourcing

8K Miles joins other online outsourcing and hiring matchmakers eLance, oDesk and Guru.com. But 8K claims it’s the only one that includes an optional cloud-computing component. Cloud-based services gel well with outsourcing because customers only pay for the resources they consume, but in this case, they can also help establish trust between partners, said Prabhu Karunakaran, 8K’s executive vice president.

“Say you need an application developed on top of your existing product,” Karunakaran said. “You want to outsource it, but you’re not comfortable sending your source code to someone you’ve never seen before, to sit on a laptop thousands of miles away…You can submit your code to a virtual computing machine, and grant appropriate access to a provider in China, etc. That person can log on to your machine, hosted by 8K Miles, and work on it, and they can’t download or upload anything.”

Asked whether security is more of a concern than a selling point of cloud computing, he said, “I would definitely agree if the question were posed a year ago,” adding that companies like Amazon.com, which provides 8K’s cloud computing, as well as Rackspace and others have allayed those concerns.

Because nearly 90% of 8K’s 30-person staff (and most of its participating service providers) are based in India, much of the connections it hopes to foster will be between US small businesses and Indian outsourcees. So far about 1400 service providers have signed on to join 8K’s community, but only 220 have been verified.