The Cloud Academy

In the past weeks we launched directly from the season of cloud events into what SYS-CON calls the Annual Predictions Bonanza. Gartner released its predictions on December 1 leading with "critical infrastructure will be disrupted by online sabotage."  At CIO magazine Bernard Golden gave two  interesting points of view, one for vendors and one for users, and even CA Technologies offered insights into the changes we expect in 2011, including how "security will shift from being perceived as a cloud inhibitor to becoming a cloud enabler." So, what happens after 2011?  In a few upcoming blogs I will highlight some "megatrends" that I believe are happening - or need to happen - in the decade about to start. (Now, you may argue that the decade started a year ago, but starting to count at zero is very "old school IT" and "old school IT" is definitely not what we are going t... (more)

Of These Ten Most Hated Jobs, How Many Did You Have?

Earlier this week Yahoo Finance ran an article on the 10 most hated jobs (based on a survey asking hundreds of thousands of employees at a major career site). What amazed me most - apart from the large number of IT jobs, including the top one,  making the list – was that I personally was employed in no less than five of these . Now you may think: “What a miserable career that must have been!”, but to be honest, it never felt like that.  Sure I can relate to some of dissatisfiers that people listed, such as a lack of direction from upper management (actually described for one of t... (more)

Notes from the Cloud Academy: RAIC - Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Cloud services

We have been running the Cloud Academy roundtables in several European countries. I’d like to share some of the more interesting questions, debates and insights around a number of topics, starting today with RAIC—Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Cloud Services. Other topics will include: A TV industry analogy: Competition for the IT department Cloud Shortcuts: Can the Cloud make( internal) IT more agile Service Level Management and the Cloud Cloud R&R - Retained responsibilities for IT Elastic Services: Everybody wants to be a manager Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Cloud service... (more)

Shedding Light on Cloud Computing - A Free Primer

Cloud Computing is the most discussed IT innovation of recent times. This Primer provides a structured overview of what Cloud Computing is and what the potential benefits and risks are. In addition it explores how Cloud Computing will impact IT management and IT's role in the organization as a service provider. It also looks at the risks of Cloud Computing. Risk is consistently cited by CIOs and CFOs as the largest obstacle of cloud computing for their organizations. In this primer we consider the risks in areas such as availability, privacy and regulatory compliance. The bookle... (more)

Vendor Lock-in and Cloud Computing

IT vendor lock-in is as old as the IT industry itself. Some may even argue that lock-in is unavoidable when using any IT solution, regardless of whether we use it “on premise” or “as a service”. To determine whether this is the case, we examine traditional lock-in and the to-be-expected impact of cloud computing. Vendor lock-in is seen as one of the potential drawbacks of cloud computing. One of Gartner’s research analysts recently published a scenario where lock-in and standards even surpass security as the biggest objection to cloud computing. Despite efforts like Open Systems... (more)