CloudStrategies Newsletter: Volume 2 Issue 1 - Feb. 2011

More Reasons to Move IT to the Cloud

  • Spend less on daily operations
  • Spend less on capital equipment investments
  • Enjoy better service

Some people are just never satisfied! ...and you should be one of them!!!

Enjoying better service while spending less money short and long term are good reasons for migrating to cloud computing. There are others!

You Can Go Your Own Way

Users and their managers are discovering the incredible productivity gains that can be achieved when work can be done equally well no matter where the user may be. With cloud computing almost nothing gets in the way of achieving a consistent and robust user experience. Handheld, laptop, tablet, desktop, it hardly matters anymore. If the user is comfortable with the keyboard, keypad, or whatever other input device is offered, the device can access the same resources with the same facility. Everything is where the user expects to find it, so there's not a lot of time lost hunting for files, documents, or other tools and resources. Since that hunting has the biggest lost-time impact on remote users, eliminating it with cloud computing strategies increases the comfort the user has in using any device over any network to run pretty much any application on any platform from anywhere and at anytime.

Cloud Photobar

Don't Worry. Be Happy.

One of the classic questions salespeople from all industries like to ask their customers is "What is keeping you up at night?" Seldom do information technology (IT)salespeople hear responses having to do with the performance of hardware or software. More often, IT managers are worried that some person did not do something they were supposed to do

Data Backup

Data Backup Assurance

In an on-premises network a quality data backup system depends in part upon people to rotate backup media, test restore, and perform other routine tasks. If media are not rotated, the result can often be lost data. Over time read/write heads can become misaligned causing the device to misrecord new data backups, or rendering it unable to recover old media. This virtually NEVER happens in a cloud-computing environment where there are redundant backup systems behind the redundant backup systems and all are managed by someone other than you, giving you recourse in the completely remote case that something does go wrong.
 Time Travel

Time Travel

Yes, there is even time travel in the cloud.

Think about the last time you saved a file and, just after you clicked "save" realized you meant to do a "save as" and change the name. Now you've clobbered one of your most valuable files. What to do? Reach out to your cloud data backup provider and "dial back" in time to a point before you clobbered your file. Then just restore that one file locally. Problem solved.
Security& Compliance

Security & Compliance

These will continue to be two of the concerns everyone expresses and argues about when discussing cloud computing for some time to come, but common sense suggests the argument is empty. Why would corporations as large as Microsoft, IBM, Google, Oracle and others risk their businesses with such enormous investments in cloud computing if they weren't absolutely certain that customers could be confident that the security and regulatory compliance achieved in their Cloud Computing offerings was superior to what customers could achieve themselves?
Growth Capacity

Growth Capacity

When a network manager convinces their company to make large new capital investments, those investments, and the anticipated return on those investments, become theirs to justify...forever. The next time there's a need to expand, scale, extend or otherwise grow the network any additions will be considered, while replacements could be career threatening.

In a cloud computing environment the need to grow is fulfilled by simply requesting more capacity. No new capital procurement, and no forklift replacements. Just throttle up for more capacity. Investment worries are gone.