Microsoft's Beginner's Guide To Cloud Computing
As I mentioned in an earlier post today, Ron Markezich is talking at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium later today in Cambridge, MA on a panel about cloud computing. I just caught up with John Foley’s post from InformationWeek who confirms that Ron will share five tips on how to get started in the cloud, based on the experiences of Microsoft's early cloud customers.
So here are the 5
- Know where and how cloud services fit into your company's IT architecture
- Prepare your company for the changes associated with cloud services
- Attend to your identity management system
- Choose the right apps
- Select the right cloud service provider
I wont steal John’s thunder as he has the detail on each but as he notes, it’s not a bad starting point to help the many befuddled executives and IT guys who’ve been baffled with the industry excitement around cloud.
Alternatively, our Presspass site has aQ&A with Ron and a series of videos discussing these key topics for CIOs looking to build a cloud strategy.
At the same time, I think it’s interesting that Software + Services is really starting to gain some acceptance in the market. Sure, people aren’t using that exact term but it’s funny how a few years ago it was derided as a way of preserving our client software business. To be honest it had a whiff of that when I first heard it but the deeper you dig, the more you can see some folks actually really thought about this and predicted where things would go. Hats off to David Tebbutt at Freeform Dynamics who’s one of the first to acknowledge this and goes so far as to say
It sticks in my craw to say it, but I think Microsoft got it dead right.