Moving to the cloud has risks

Providers sell the cloud as an appealing alternative to running business applications out of your own data center. The cloud avoids large capital investments in facilities, hardware infrastructure and software licensing. It provides predicable budget outlays year after year. It also reduces workload so your staff can focus on activities like documenting business requirements and designing solutions.

But while providers do an excellent job of selling those benefits, they do little to explain the risks. Below are five critical areas to consider when looking to deploy a new application, or move an existing application, to the cloud. 

Read this article in it's entirety at Sacramento Business Journal >>>

Avoid the Spreadsheet Trap

Spreadsheet programs like Microsoft’s Excel are excellent tools for comparing options and analyzing data. Many small businesses use them instead of more expensive applications for financial, inventory or customer management.

But beware: Using a spreadsheet in place of a more specialized program can hold your data hostage. The appeal of a spreadsheet’s wide-open capabilities is also its downfall.

Let’s take a hypothetical scenario to demonstrate the slippery slope.

At first we start with simple list data like customer name, email, phone, address, products purchased and total sales. Add in a summation formula for total customers and revenue.

We need some standardization. Turn the products-purchased field from free-form entry into a drop-down list. The sales team likes it but wants the customers classified by region and their total revenue broken out by each product category purchased. Add a region field, populate the regional data and do a “sum if” statement to calculate revenue by category.

Is this starting to sound familiar? Read this article in it's entirety at Sacramento Business Journal >>>

Do you know which cloud you're buying?

Plenty of ambiguity still exists around what exactly is the cloud. The ambiguity creates a lack of transparency and ultimately confusion for buyers. My theory on the root of this confusion is we all reference one cloud, but in reality we have two clouds, an enterprise cloud and a consumer cloud. Do you know which cloud you've bought or plan to buy? This post offers a tool to quickly assess your cloud type. I'll then run the tool against some the biggest players in the cloud to find out where they fall.

 Read this article in it's entirety on LinkedIn>>>

What is the “right” Information Technology for my Business?

The biggest information technology (IT) problem any company faces is how to find, evaluate and select the “right” information technology. The problem is compounded by the rapid evolution of information technology and the extensive options bombarding businesses.

I help startups and small businesses tackle this problem in the Sacramento SCORE class “How to Improve your Business through Technology”. The class teaches a framework for the discovery, evaluation and selection of technology that drives the three most important things in business; people, process and product. If people, process and product are an unfamiliar concept, one of the best and most entertaining ways to learn about this concept is to watch Marcus Lemonis on CNBC’s “The Profit”.

A leap to the cloud requires commitment, preparation

If your company still hasn’t put critical applications and data on the cloud, 2014 should be the year. At the very least, your organization should be discussing a migration strategy and timeline.

Cloud computing provides smaller companies a way to level the playing field with larger competitors. Companies no longer need significant investments in data centers with advanced computing infrastructure. Instead, the cloud allows them to acquire information technology as they need it.

But the transition typically isn’t easy. The cloud is still relatively new and even the most mature providers have limitations. So here are a few cautions when developing your migration strategy.

Know your provider

First of all, be sure you know the provider’s capabilities and responsibilities. A client assessment I performed highlights the importance of knowing a provider’s capabilities and responsibilities.

Read this article in it's entirety at the Sacramento Business Journal Read More>>

Your IT Department's Dirty Little Secret

When you access your organization's applications such as email or financials, or use a service such as the Internet or printing, there is a lot of technology you don't see underneath. This technology is a complex stack of hardware and software working together to establish the infrastructure and platform layers, which are required to run your organization's applications and services. The infrastructure and platform layers are rapidly moving towards commoditization, and you've probably heard the terms describing this movement, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

For many small and midsized organizations this commoditization movement is your IT department's dirty little secret.

Challenging the need for "The Cloud"

Technology vendors, service providers and value-added resellers (VARs) are driving the value of the cloud hard. But will moving to the cloud really help your bottom line or does it only add to someone else’s?

Who needs the cloud?

The five essential characteristics that define the cloud (see prior post Why is "The Cloud" still unclear?) introduce added capabilities for an organization, but they also introduce added cost.

Why is "The Cloud" still unclear?

After more than five years of using the term "The Cloud", technology vendors, resellers, service providers, analysts, and IT professionals still use inconsistent definitions for cloud computing (i.e. "The Cloud").  There are plenty of reasons for this lack of consistency, but the end result is confusion for many organizations seeking the benefits of cloud computing. The intent of this post is to break down cloud computing into manageable segments to provide leaders of organizations (business, education, government, etc.) a foundation to converse with IT staff, consultants and vendors on potential cloud solutions.

Establishing a Cloud Foundation

To explain cloud computing I'll use simplified definitions