Sunny Weather Cutting Through The Clouds

I’ve already talked many times in this ‘ere blog about how cloudy the cloud can be to many would-be adopters.

And it hasn’t got much clearer; in the past 18 months I’ve tested storage in the cloud, security in the cloud, service desk in the cloud, optimisation in the cloud… I assume there must be cloud-based weather report services? The issue for the would-be adopter is therefore – do I need ALL of these cloud-based services/technologies? And what do I keep and what do I throw away? Does one of these services give me “cloud-based everything”?

Well, no, but we’re getting there. This week in London I had the pleasure of meeting up with Cloudistics (despite GWRs best efforts) – there’s a clue in the name as to what area of IT they are playing in, to discuss their formal EMEA entry (not for Eurovision) and the logistics thereof. The basic premise is to make cloud adoption as easy and cost-effective as possible and to work with what’s already in place. So that answers a significant number of questions straight up.

One thing that is also clearly understood is that, even with an outsourced, “in the Ether” service, such as a public/private cloud, the EMEA market – with its geo-cultural fragmentation – is a very different market to the US, albeit allowing for no one every mistaking Seattle with North Carolina (unless you’re from the latter). This is a massive benefit of a cloud-based approach; you have the basic set of tools, but they can be manipulated to order, so you get optimisation and economies of scale in tandem. For any variation on an MSP, or any reseller wanting to reinvent themselves, something like Cloudistics is something they really should get quite excited about, almost right up there with a 1961 vintage Taylors port (but not quite, obviously).

Which leads us to another thread of conversation in the meeting – education. Lots of it. Needed. But ‘twas ever the way with IT; some people still don’t know how to configure VLANs correctly. Actually, probably most people… Hey, that’s what outsourcing is all about 😊 – it’s not the end users that need educating but the middle-men, the resellers. They need margin, value-add, a living. Vendors such as Cloudistics are offering that option. They should grab it.