Reassuring Cloud Lessons

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School Lesson

Ready for an IT history lesson?

First there were mainframes, then client-servers, then the Web and now there is the Cloud. How succinct can you get?

This brief history is just one of the things that attracted me to an article about how the Cloud is coming of age. The piece featured a Gartner analyst, Errol Rasit, at a Cloud conference in New Zealand. He shed light on the fluid face of today’s IT cloud infrastructure at many companies — and at the same time, put IT folks at ease.

Regarding fluidity of the cloud, his point: assume not that all corporate clouds are alike — just like people. Some organizations use private clouds out of security concerns, and many of them are customized to meet all kinds of data-sharing needs. Meanwhile others find incredible savings and efficiencies in a public cloud, for example, Google Apps. Then again — there are many who are hybrid, meaning, they’re operating both types (The public cloud acts as a backup for when a company’s internal cloud is running at full capacity, for example).

Two more things interested me in the article, and I thought it’d be good to share them with you, especially if you’re an IT manager who’s reluctant to migrate to the cloud or cringe over fear of losing your job every time you hear about the growth of the cloud.

First, the Gartner guy’s very good advice that non-mission critical applications, or those that require less than 99.999% uptime, are good contenders for being delivered via the cloud. If you’re nervous about downtime (which you can always have monitored, anyway), go with the less critical apps or important data.

The second point: While saving money and time and labor is a big cloud selling point, don’t automatically assume that you’ll lose your job if you migrate. “ITs role will be different,” said Rasit. “If you put something into the cloud, it is still IT’s role to administer it, and to tell the cloud provider if something is not optimal.”

For more success stories about how IT pros are embracing the cloud and furthering their careers, see Paid Monitor’s testimonials.