Cloud is Really a Service Disguised as a Solution

Cloud is not a solution -- it's a set of services, education, and training

Companies are desperate for knowledge when it comes to cloud. Executives want it and IT frankly is struggling with the best way to go about it or whether it even makes sense to adopt it. On the consumer side, I find myself moving more and more to the cloud. Music, photos, notes, email and even scanned-in paperwork is all in the cloud and that has made my life significantly easier and saved me time-two traits any high performance company is looking to achieve. But, taking my personal experience with the cloud into enterprise IT is not a small task. Successful cloud adoption involves:

• Executive sponsorship
• Long term forward IT thinking (Note: this is difficult to find since most CIOs get bonuses on a yearly basis and not for long-term cloud strategies)
• Self assessment and discovery to identify successful opportunities
• A skill set mix that breaks down the barriers between IT disciplines and flattens the IT organization
• Application experience to truly understand the application, its impact on IT infrastructure, and more importantly, its impact on the business
• Economic and financial analysis that involves the CFO and key stakeholders in the business
• Legal and contract knowledge to negotiate and help transform the business to alternative consumption models
• And perhaps most importantly, transparency. From an end-user's perspective, the transition to any internal, external, hybrid, public cloud strategy should be completely invisible and transparent.

There is not a single solution that is going to solve your cloud computing initiative. Rather, it is a set of services, education, and training that will shift IT into the next era of computing.

• Cloud Computing