By Francis Czekalski, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne
Earlier this month I presented at GreenPages’ annual Summit Event. My breakout presentation this year was an End User Computing Super Session. In this video, I summarize the ‘top 10 ways to kill your VDI project.’
If you’re interested in learning more, download this free on-demand webinar where I share some real world VDI battlefield stories.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9w1o0O8IaI
By Chris Ward, CTO, LogicsOne
For those of you who aren’t out in San Francisco at the 10th annual VMworld event, here is a quick overview of what was covered in the opening keynote delivered by CEO Pat Gelsinger’s opening:
Next, we heard from Martin Casado. Martin is the CTO – Networking at VMware and came over from the Nicira acquisition and was speaking about VMware NSX. NSX is a combination of vCloud Network and Security (vCNS) and Nicira. Essentially, NSX is a network hypervisor that abstracts the underlying networking hardware just like ESX abstracts underlying server hardware.
Other topics to note:
So, all-in-all a good start to the event. Network virtualization/NSX is clearly the focus of this conference and vCHS is a not too distant 2nd. Something that was omitted from the keynote was the rewritten SSO engine for vCenter 5.5. The piece was weak for 5.1 and has been vastly improved with 5.5…this could be addressed tomorrow as most of the tech staff is in Tuesday’s general session.
If you’re at the event…I’ll actually be speaking on a panel tomorrow at 2:30 about balancing agility with service standardization. I’ll be joining Khalid Hakim and Kurt Milne of VMware, along with Dave Bartoletti of Forrester Research and Ian Clayton of Service Management 101. I will also be co-presenting on Wednesday with my colleague John Dixon at 2:30-3:30 in the Moscone West Room 2011 about deploying a private cloud service catalogue. Hopefully you can swing by.
More to come soon!
Last week, I met with a number of our top clients near the GreenPages HQ in Portsmouth, NH at our annual Summit event to talk about successful adoption of cloud technologies. In this post, I’ll give a summary of my cloud adoption advice, and cover some of the feedback that I heard from customers during my discussions. Here we go…
The Market for IT Services
I see compute infrastructure looking more and more like a commodity, and that there is intense competition in the market for IT services, particularly Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).
I think that the first data point here is absolutely stunning, even considering that it covers a time span of 11 years. Of course, a simple Google search will return a number of other similar quotes. How can Amazon and others continue to drop their prices for IaaS, while improving quality at the same time? From a market behavior point of view, I think that the answer is clear – Amazon Web Services and others specialize in providing IaaS. That’s all they do. That’s their core business. Like any other for-profit business, IaaS providers prefer to make investments in projects that will improve their bottom line. And, like any other for-profit business, those investments enable companies like AWS to effectively compete with other providers (like Verizon/Terremark, for example) in the market.
Register for our upcoming webinar on 8/22 to learn how to deal with the challenges of securely managing corporate data across a broad array of computing platforms.
With network and other technologies as they are, businesses now have a choice of where to host infrastructure that supports their applications. In other words, the captive corporate IT department may be the preferred provider of infrastructure (for now), but they are now effectively competing with outside IaaS providers. Why, then, would the business not choose the lowest cost provider? Well, the answer to that question is quite the debate in cloud computing (we’ll put that aside for now). Suffice to say that we think that internal corporate IT departments are now competing with outside providers to provide IaaS and other services to the business and that this will become more apparent as technology advances (e.g., as workloads become more portable, network speeds increase, storage becomes increasingly less costly, etc.).
Now here’s the punch line and the basis for our guidance on cloud computing; how should internal corporate IT position itself to stay competitive? At our annual Summit event last week, I discussed the progression of the corporate IT department from a provider of technology to a provider of services (see my whitepaper on cloud management for detail). The common thread is that corporate IT evolves by becoming closer and closer to the requirements of the business – and may even be able to anticipate requirements of the business or suggest emerging technology to benefit the business. To take advantage of cloud computing, one thing corporate IT can do is source commodity services to outside providers where it makes sense. Fundamentally, this has been commonplace in other industries for some time – manufacturing being one example. OEM automotive manufacturers like GM and Ford do not produce the windshields and brake calipers that are necessary for a complete automobile – it just isn’t worth it for GM or Ford to produce those things. They source windshields, brake calipers, and other components from companies who specialize. GM, Ford, and others are then left with more resources to invest in designing, assembling and marketing a product that appeals to end users like you and I.
So, it comes down to this: how do internal corporate IT departments make intelligent sourcing decisions? We suggest that the answer is in thinking about packaging and delivering IT services to the business.
GreenPages Assessment and Design Method
So, how does GreenPages recommend that customers take advantage of cloud computing? Even if you are not considering external cloud at this time, I think it makes sense to prepare your shop for it. Eventually, cloud may make sense for your shop even if, at this time, there is no fit for it. The guidance here is to take a methodical look at how your department is staffed and operated. ITIL v2 and v3 provide a good guide here of what should be examined:
Assigning a score to each of these areas in terms of repeatability, documentation, measurement, and continuous improvement will paint the picture of how well your department can make informed sourcing decisions. Conducting an assessment and making some housekeeping improvements where needed will serve two purposes:
When and if cloud computing services look like a good option for your company, your department will be able to make an informed decision on which services to use at which times. And, if you’re building an internal private cloud, the processes listed above will form the cornerstone of the way you will operate as a service provider.
Case Study: Service Catalog and Private Cloud
Implementing a Service Catalog, corporate IT departments can take a solid first step to becoming a service provider and staying close to the requirements of the business. This year at VMworld in San Francisco, I’ll be leading a session to present a case study of a recent client that did exactly this with our help. If you’re going to be out at VMworld, swing by and listen in to my session!
Free webinar on 8/22: Horizon Suite – How to Securely Enable BYOD with VMware’s Next Gen EUC Platform.
With a growing number of consumer devices proliferating the workplace, lines of business turning to cloud-based services, and people demanding more mobility in order to be productive, IT administrators are faced with a new generation of challenges for securely managing corporate data across a broad array of computing platforms.
By John Dixon, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne
Recently GreenPages and our partner Gravitant hosted a webinar on Cloud Service Broker technology. Senior Analyst Dave Bartoletti gave a preface to the webinar with Forrester’s view on cloud computing and emerging technology. In this post we’ll give some perspective on highlights from the webinar. In case you missed it, you can also watch a replay of the webinar here: http://bit.ly/12yKJrI
Ben Tao, Director of Marketing for Gravitant, kicks off the discussion by describing the traditional data center sourcing model. Two key points here:
The end result is that cloud computing can drive the benefit of a multi-sourcing model for IT, where sourcing decisions are made in close proximity to the use of services. This has the potential of enabling organizations to adjust their sourcing decisions more often to best suit the needs of their applications.
Next, Dave Bartoletti describes the state of cloud computing and the requirements for hybrid cloud management. The core of Dave’s message is that the use of cloud computing is on the rise, and that cloud is being leveraged for more and more complex applications – including those with sensitive data.
Dave’s presentation is based on the statement, “what IT must do to deliver on the hybrid cloud promise…”
Some key points here:
Dave does an excellent job of explaining the things that IT must do in order to deliver on the hybrid cloud promise. Often, conversations on cloud computing are purely about technology, but I think there’s much more at stake. For example, Dave’s first two points above really resonate with me. You can also read “cloud computing” as ITIL-style sourcing. Cloud computing puts service management back in focus. “Cloud is about IT services first, infrastructure second,” and “You won’t own the infrastructure […]” also suggests that cloud computing may influence a shift in the makeup of corporate IT departments – fewer core technologists and more “T-shaped” individuals. So called T-shaped individuals have knowledge and experience with a broad set of technologies (the top of the “T”), but have depth in one or more areas like programming, Linux, or storage area networking. My prediction is that there will still be a need for core technologists; but that some of them may move into roles to do things like define customer-facing IT services. For this reason, our CMaaS product also includes optional services to deal with this type of workforce transformation. This is an example of a non-technical item that must be made when considering cloud computing. Do you agree? Do you have other non-technical considerations for cloud computing?
Chris Ward, CTO of LogicsOne, then dives in to the functionality of the Cloud Management as a Service, or CMaaS offering. The GreenPages CMaaS product implements some key features that can be used to help customers advance to the lofty points that Dave suggests in his presentation. CMaaS includes a cloud brokerage component and a multi-cloud monitoring and management component. Chris details some main features from the brokerage tool, which are designed to address the key points that Dave brought up:
Chris then gives an example from the State of Texas and the benefits that they realized from using cloud through a broker. Essentially, with the growing popularity of e-voting and the use of the internet as an information resource on candidates and issues, the state knew the demand for IT resources would skyrocket on election day. Instead of throwing away money to buy extra infrastructure to satisfy a temporary surge in demand, Texas utilized cloud brokerage to seamlessly provision IT resources in real time from multiple public cloud sources to meet the variability in demand.
All in all, the 60-minute webinar is time well spent and gives clients some guidance to think about cloud computing in the context of a service broker.
To view this webinar in it’s entirety click here or download this free whitepaper to learn more about hybrid cloud management
By Praveen Asthana, Chief Marketing Officer, Gravitant
The concept of “Just-in-Time” was pioneered in the manufacturing supply chain as a critical way to reduce costs by minimizing inventory. Implementing a just-in-time system that can handle unexpected demand is not a trivial undertaking. It requires the confluence of a number of disciplines such as analytics, statistics, sourcing, procurement, production management, brokerage and economics.
An interesting new idea is to take this concept pioneered in manufacturing and apply it to Information Technology resources. Doing this can provide an effective way to meet dynamically changing needs while minimizing the inventory of unused IT resources across a set of cloud services platform and providers.
Case Study: Election Day 2012.
With the growing popularity of e-voting and use of the Internet as an information resource on candidates and issues, the Secretary of State’s office for one of the most populous U.S. states knew that demand for IT resources would go up significantly on election day. But they didn’t know exactly how much, and they didn’t want to buy extra infrastructure for a temporary surge in demand. Even if they could come up with a good guess for the demand, deploying the right amount of resources in a timely manner would be challenging. Given the time it normally took (months) to deploy and provision new servers, the Secretary of State’s office knew they couldn’t use traditional means to procure compute and storage capacity to meet this demand.
As it turned out, demand went up over 1000% to over five million hits on the state voting web site by noon on Election Day.
Fortunately the state had deployed a novel capability based on a cloud brokerage and management platform to seamlessly provision IT resources in real time from multiple public cloud sources to meet the variability in demand. As a result, this demand was fully met without needing to do complicated planning or buy unneeded infrastructure. I’ll actually be speaking on a webinar with Chris Ward, CTO at GreenPages-LogicsOne and Dave Bartoletti, a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research on June 12th to talk about leveraging cloud brokerage and the impact it can have on managing your IT environment.
Minutes, not months—that’s what enterprise users want when it comes to having I.T. resources available to meet changing business needs or develop new applications.
However users find this to be an extraordinary challenge—most IT departments today struggle with rigid processes, a round-robin of tasks and approvals across multiple silos and departments, and manual provisioning steps. All this adds significant time to the deployment of I.T. resources resulting in users waiting for months before the resources they need become available.
How do users respond to such delays? By going around their IT departments and directly accessing cloud services. Often termed ‘rogue IT’ or ‘shadow IT,’ such out of process actions expose the company to financial risk, security risks, and operational risk.
The Solution: Just-in-time IT with Real-Time Governance
Just-in-time IT is not merely about using private or public cloud services. It is about engineering the end-to-end IT supply chain so it can be agile and respond immediately to dynamic business needs. To achieve this in practice, you need:
The first critical aspect of real time supply chain is identifying, sourcing and procurement of best fit cloud platforms and providers (internal or external) to meet your unique business needs.
The second critical aspect of ensuring just-in-time IT is effective is real-time governance, for this is the mechanism by which you truly manage the elasticity of cloud resources and ensure that IT resource inventory is minimized. This also has the additional benefit of eliminating shadow or rogue I.T.
As I mentioned above, if you’re interested in learning more on this topic I would highly recommend registering for the upcoming webinar “What’s Missing In Today’s Hybrid Cloud Management – Leveraging Cloud Brokerage” being held on June 12th. This should be a great session and there will be time for Q & A at the end.
About the Author:
Praveen Asthana is Chief Marketing Officer of Gravitant (www.gravitant.com), a cloud services brokerage and management company. Prior to joining Gravitant, Praveen was Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for Dell’s $13B Enterprise Solutions Division.
By Lawrence Kohan, Senior Consultant, LogicsOne
This is the first of a two-part blog series intended to provide practical, real world examples of when it makes sense to use the cloud and when it does not.
We’re well into an exciting new era in the technology world. The buzz-words are flying around at light speeds, and talk of “Cloud” and “software-defined-everything” is all the rage.
Advances in virtualization, which allows software processes to be decoupled from underlying hardware is giving way to amazing possibilities for moving around workloads as needed, either between racks in a datacenter, or even between datacenters! In addition, the concept of “Cloud” is very exciting in the possibilities is offers business to leverage these advances by being able to move workloads offsite for greater availability, redundancy, disaster recovery.
Indeed, the promise of the Cloud as a whole is to provide IT as a service. It’s a way of offering companies resources on a metered usage basis, so that they can consume as needed, grow or reduce their resources as needed, and only pay on a per use basis for what they consume, as needed. The hope is to free up a business and their IT staff from worrying about the mundane, daily details and repetitive administrative tasks and burdens of keeping the business functioning and allows them to be more strategic with their time and efforts. In the Cloud Era, servers and desktops can be provisioned, configured, and deployed in minutes instead of weeks! The time saved allows the business to focus on all other areas of the business to make it more profitable, such as their marketing and advertising strategies, application/website development, and the betterment of their product and services.
Cloudy Conditions Ahead
All of this sounds like a wonderful dream. However, before jumping in, it is important to understand what the business goals are. What is it you intend to get out of the Cloud? How do you intend to leverage it to your best advantage? These questions and answers must come first before any decision is made regarding software vendors or Cloud service providers to be used. The promise of the Cloud is tremendous gains in efficiency, but only when it is adopted and utilized correctly.
Register for our upcoming free webinar on June 12th on what’s missing in hybrid cloud management today. Speakers include Chris Ward from GreenPages, Praveen Asthana from Gravitant, and David Bartoletti, a top analyst from Forrester Research.
To Host or Not to Host?
For starters, let’s look at a simple use case: Whether or not to host a company’s e-mail in the Cloud.
Pros:
Cons:
There are factors that can either be positives or negatives depending on the business size and need. For example, a small startup company with only several people needs to be extremely budget conscious. In their case, it would certainly make more sense financially to outsource their e-mail for a monthly fee instead of looking to install and maintain their own internal email servers, which after hardware and software costs and licensing would cost 5 figures, not to mention needed at least one dedicated person to maintain it. This is certainly not a cost-effective option for a small, young company trying to get off the ground.
Download this free whitepaper to learn more about how organizations can revolutionize the way it manages hybrid cloud environments.
At the same time, a very large enterprise with thousands of mailboxes may find the process of migration to be an expensive, time consuming administrative burden. While offsite email would offer good availability and safeguards against system failure, perhaps even above and beyond what the enterprise currently utilizes, it is also a substantial risk; if the Cloud Provider has an outage that could affect the enterprise’s email access. The same risk would apply to a small business as well; however, the smaller and more localized the business, the more likely they are to adapt to an e-mail outage and resume intra-office communications via secondary means—a contingency plan that is more difficult to act upon for a larger global enterprise. And, yes, the enterprise that hosts e-mail internally has the same risk of an outage, however that enterprise can respond to an internal e-mail outage immediately and be able to ascertain how long the outage will be, instead of being at the mercy of the Cloud Provider’s timetable and troubleshooting efforts.
Therefore, in our sample “hosted e-mail” use case, it would make more sense for a smaller business to consider the option of moving e-mail services to the Cloud, and may not provide much value, if any, for the enterprise.
In the second part of this two-part blog series, I will cover when is a good time to utilize cloud for medium to large businesses. In the meantime, would love to hear your thoughts!
Webinar June 12th 11am-12pm EST “What’s Missing in Today’s Hybrid Cloud Management – Leveraging Cloud Brokerage” Speakers from Forrester, GreenPages, and Gravitant. Register here!
By John Dixon
With Thanksgiving just around the corner, I decided to take a couple minutes to think about what tech gadgets I have been most thankful for in 2012. I’ve seen both consumers and corporate clients really begin to embrace a few technologies over the past year. As a consultant, a lot of these things make life easier for me, my coworkers, and my company.
1. DropBox
…and other online file-sharing/storage solutions. This is more of a selfish item. I use DropBox personally to sync documents and data across various devices. Being on the road much of the time, I’ve assembled a small arsenal of technology to try and find that allusive combination that truly helps me deliver services to my clients. More and more devices sometimes makes it more difficult to stay organized. One platform, like DropBox, that helps me access my documents from any device is a technology that I’ve grown to rely on.
2. SSD Drives
For the first time, I can run several virtual machines and my desktop OS from my laptop, without sacrificing performance. I never thought I would need to do this, but it certainly helps my day-to-day productivity. I run one desktop that is always connected to the VPN of my client project, one for my GreenPages desktop, and my desktop OS to access documents on my local machine. Being able to instantly switch between them has been a huge help to me lately. Sometimes I’ll spin up a new VM to test a concept or a piece of code. The SSD makes all of this possible.
3. Cloud Infrastructure Services
Being able to spin up a virtual environment quickly and for low cost has really been helpful for both me and some of my clients. For example, recently I was able to spin up a J2EE (Tomcat, mysql, Apache) environment for a day to test something for one of my clients. I didn’t need to keep any of the data in the environment, so I used it for a day and shut it down, all for about $2.00 or so. Once the monitoring and management is ironed out, I really think this type of IaaS will be a very attractive alternative for corporate clients, especially development groups and startups.
4. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
GreenPages recently adopted this option for desktop computing, and I think it is fantastic. Having an arsenal of technology available to you is one thing, but having the arsenal of technology that you are comfortable using and are excited about is another. BYOD allows employees to get the technology that best fits their working style and expertise. I think this will become more and more important as the trend advances to employ more and more remote resources. And the next generation of workers – those who have grown up with all-the-time connectivity – will almost certainly work more efficiently with BYOD policies instead of TIWYG (This Is What You Get) policies.
5. Cloud Collaboration Platforms
This one is similar to #1, but more along the lines of collaboration. I work in a distributed team where face-to-face communication is not always possible. Being able to share documents and track issues from the same platform is almost necessary when it comes to complex projects.
6. App Stores
I admit, I like Apple stuff. I’ve heard the resentment of the Apple App Store – it’s a closed system, Apple gives only a 30% cut to developers, etc. But how often do you see a small organization or even a single individual effectively competing in the same market/landscape with large corporations? The cool thing about the App Store is that it narrows the focus on quality and experience of the product (the App, in this case). Sometimes the smaller organizations, including some of our clients, can deliver higher quality products and services than the “big guys.” App Stores are cool because they basically level the playing field.
7. Bluetooth In Rental Cars
I travel a decent amount so this is obviously extremely helpful when I am on the road. Another thing I can be thankful for!
What technologies are you Thankful for this year?
GreenPages is holding an event in Atlanta next week on the 28th. Come listen to our experts discuss everything from clustered datacenters, to buzz from VMworld, to VDI battlefield stories.
By Geoff Smith, Senior Solutions Architect
If you have read my last three blogs on the changing landscape of IT management, you can probably guess by now where I’m leaning in terms of what should be a key metric in determining success: the experience of the user.
As any industry progresses from its infancy to mainstream acceptance, the focus for success invariably transitions from being the “wizard-behind-the-curtain” towards transparency and accountability. Think of the automobile industry. Do you really buy a car anymore, or do you buy a driving experience? Auto manufacturers have had to add a slew of gizmos (some which have absolutely nothing to do with driving) and services (no-cost maintenance plans, loaners, roadside assistance) that were always the responsibility of the consumer before.
It is the same with IT today. We can no longer just deliver a service to our consumers; we must endeavor to ensure the quality of the consumer’s experience using that service. This pushes the boundaries for what we need to see, measure, and respond to beyond the obvious green light/red light blinking in the datacenter. As IT professionals, we need to validate that the services we deliver are being consumed in a manner that enables the user to be productive for the business.
In other words, knowing you have 5 9s of availability for your ERP system is great, but does it really explain the whole story? If a system is up and available, but the user experience is poor enough to affect productivity, and results in a lower than expected output from that population, what is the net result?
Moving our visibility out to this level is not easy. We have always relied upon the user to initiate the process and have responded reactively. With the right framework, we can expand our proactive capabilities, alerting us to potential efficiency issues before the user experience degrades to the point of visibility. In this way, we move our “cheese” from systems availability to service usability. The business can then see a direct correlation between what we provided and the actual business value what we provided has delivered.
Some of the management concepts here are not entirely new, but the way they are leveraged may be. Synthetic transactions, round-trip analytics, and bandwidth analysis are a few of the vectors to consider. But as important is how we react to events in these streams, and how quickly we can return usability to “Normal State.” Auto discovery and re-direction play key roles and parallel process troubleshooting tools can minimize experience impact.
As we move forward, we need to jettison the old concepts of inside-out monitoring and management and a datacenter focus, and move toward service-oriented metrics and measurement across infrastructure layers from delivery engine to consumption point.
Guest Post from Caitlin Buxton, Director of North American Channel Sales, WhatsUp Gold Network Management Division of Ipswitch, Inc.
The WhatsUp Gold team attended the GreenPages Annual Technology Summit this week on the scenic New Hampshire/Maine Seacoast. This event was one of the most valuable technology summits we have participated in this year. The three-day event showcased all of GreenPages’ exemplary talent, skill, and professionalism that the organization brings to the IT community for both clients and vendor partners.
During the Partner Pavilion, we exhibited WhatsUp Gold’s Suite of Network Management and Log Management solutions and showed attendees how these solutions install, discover, and map network connected assets in minutes. We also showcased the powerful SNMP, WMI and SSH monitoring, alerting and notification capabilities, and web-based management which gives organizations a complete picture of an entire network infrastructure in real-time.
The entire GreenPages staff worked very closely with our team both in pre-event planning and during the event to make sure our investment and time was well spent by engaging with their clients, learning their challenges, and understanding how our solutions can make life easier. The GreenPages Account Managers were fantastic in providing insight into their clients’ needs and facilitating productive conversations.
I was also impressed by how many clients raved about the incredible value they receive from GreenPages. Repeatedly, I was told how hard the GreenPages team works to understand their individual business needs and helps to deliver solutions and information specific to their needs. They are always looking out for their customers’ best interests.
This is not surprising given that 100 IT Executives with limited time and budgets would not have travelled from all over the country for this event if they did not get significant value from it. However, it was refreshing to hear directly from the customers. It validates the pride I have in our GreenPages partnership knowing such a quality organization is on our team representing the WhatsUp Gold family of solutions.
Well done GreenPages! Thank you!
Journey to the Cloud has now been around for over a year! We thought it would be cool to count down our Top 10 Posts since starting the blog. Let us know in the comment section if you think we missed one of your favorites!
10. Cloud Theory to Cloud Reality: The Importance of Partner Management by Robb Schlosser
In Robb’s one and only post he discusses the importance of partner management on an organization’s journey to the cloud.
9. Going Rogue: Do the Advantages Outweigh the Risks? by John Dixon
John reflects on a Twitter chat he participated in hosted by the Cloud Commons blog. Are all rogue IT projects bad things? Could this type of activity be beneficial? If rogue IT projects could be beneficial, should they be supported or even encouraged?
8. The Journey to the New IT: Four Key Observations by Chris Chesley
In this video blog (accompanied by text), Solutions Architect Chris Chesley discusses the four major transformations he has seen in IT. Users are now the focus, not applications or locations, Virtualization is now a commodity, Cloud is here, and Better technology, better ways of solving issues.
7. The Private Cloud Strikes Back by Trevor Williamson
When Salesforce.com’s JP Rangaswami made comments dissing the private cloud, Trevor Williamson responded with fire!
6. Thin on Thin Provisioning – Good Idea or Recipe for Disaster? by Chris Ward
Chris Ward discusses best practices of thin on thin provisioning. What is it? How do I use it? Positives vs. Negatives? Recommendations.
5. How Cloud Computing is Like Transforming a ’68 Dodge Dart by Trevor Williamson
In order to break down the many different concepts of cloud and cloud technologies, Trevor compares a traditionally managed datacenter with a 1968 Dodge Dart. Video & Text.
4. Mobile Devices in a Cloud World by Ken Smith
In this post, Ken discusses security of endpoint mobile devices.
3. What Should I Do about Cloud? by John Dixon
Pick your poison… Public, Private, Hybrid, Community, SaaS, IaaS, PaaS… even XaaS (anything as a service!). On-premises, off-premises… or even “on-premise” if you want!
2. How a Cloud Infrastructure Can Save or Make You Money by Trevor Williamson
Everyone is wondering about the ROI of a cloud infrastructure. In this post, Trevor points to where the revenue benefits are found or where costs are typically saved in a cloud infrastructure vs. a traditional infrastructure.
1. Planning for Cloud Infrastructures: Build It and They Will…Not Pay For It? by Trevor Williamson
And at number 1…Trevor discusess the CAPEX and OPEX funding issues that are causing the biggest headaches in the industry!
What’d you think of the list?
If you’re looking for additional free resources check out this Private Cloud Preflight Checklist, this VDI Webinar Recording, or this Managed Services Article!