By Ben Stephenson, Journey to the Cloud

Our Journey to the Cloud blog has been live for a little over two years now, and I’ve had the privilege of running and managing it from the start. I wanted to touch base about the site, share my unique perspective from managing it, and hear from our readers about what we can do to make it even better.

Our goal from the very beginning was to establish ourselves as thought leaders in the industry by providing high quality content that was relevant and beneficial to IT decision makers. We wanted to make sure we let our authors keep their opinions and voice, while at the same time taking an unbiased, agnostic approach. The last thing we wanted to do was start blathering on about what a great company GreenPages is or bragging about the most recent award we won (it was being named to the Talkin’ Cloud 100 if you were wondering…).  Over the course of the two years, we’ve posted over 200 blogs and seen the number of page views and shares across various social media sites increase drastically. We’ve brought in some big time guest bloggers such as ConnectEDU CTO Rick Blaisdell, CA’s Andi Mann, the Director, Advanced Analytics and Sr. Research Scientist at Gravitant, and more. We’ve incorporated a lot of video as well – in fact for whatever strange reason someone thought it was a good idea to let me host our Cloud Corner Series. We’ve covered topics ranging from cloud, virtualization, end user computing, BYOD, network infrastructure, storage, disaster recovery, shadow IT, project management, and much more.

Have there been challenges along the way? Absolutely. Have I had to go after people and chase them down, scratching and clawing until I get a blog to post? Yes. Have tears been shed? Has blood been shed? We’ll keep that to ourselves as it’s generally frowned upon by HR. And, yes, I have had to give William Wallace-like speeches to attempt to rally the troops. While there have been some challenges, all in all there’s been a great amount of enthusiasm and support from our writers to produce a high quality publication. For me, being in the industry for two years now with no previous technological background, the amount I’ve learned is ridiculous. Before starting at GreenPages, I would have rather listened to a Ben Stein Lecture or Bill Lumbergh explaining TPS Reports than read an article on software defined networking and the impact it will have on businesses in the next 5-10 years. I can see why our customers get excited to work with our consultants because they truly love and believe in the technology they talk about. I completely buy into their enthusiasm and passion and it makes me genuinely interested in the topics we cover. I’m in my mid-twenties and have, sadly, found myself out drinking at a bar with my friends having a great time before somehow winding up in a heated debate over the pros and cons of moving to a hybrid cloud architecture.

 

So, in case, for whatever deranged reason, you haven’t read all 200 of our posts, I’m going to list out my top ten from the past two years (in no particular order). Take a look and let me know what you think:

 

• Part 2: Want to Go Cloud? What’s the Use Case? This is part two of a two part series from Larry Kohan. One of the biggest concerns around cloud is the unwillingness to move everything in your environment to the cloud. In this post, Larry outlines specific use cases of when it makes sense for different companies to move things to the cloud (and when it doesn’t). He provides real, practical advice and doesn’t try to make it seem like every application is a good fit for cloud in every circumstance
• Evolving to a Broker of Technology Services: Planning the Solution The term “cloud brokerage” is being used more and more now. I like this post because we were talking about it a year ago in great detail. Broken down nicely and easy to follow.
• Colocation: 55+ living for your IT equipment This post is a great metaphor comparing moving your datacenter to a colo facility and people moving into 55+ communities. If building isn’t an option why not rent? Why have to deal with landscaping, plowing, or leaky roofs when you can be taking advantage of that early bird special?
• Cloud Corner Series -The Networking & Storage Challenges Around Clustered Datacenters Forget the content, take a look at the host!
• Is There Such a Thing as Just-In-Time IT? This post applies the concept of Just-in-Time manufacturing to the IT world. This is a main concept in our Cloud Management as a Service Offering
• The Mac Chronicles – A CTO Perspective CTO Chris Ward just ranting and raving about his experiences using a Mac. The passion…oh the passion
• Disaster Recovery in the Cloud, or DRaaS: Revisited This blog by Randy Weis actually ended up inspiring a new offering from GreenPages that we currently use. Yes, I will take some credit.
• Planning for Cloud Infrastructures: Build It and They Will…Not Pay For It? This post has the most views out of any on Journey to the Cloud. Must be something good about it, right?
• Going Rogue: Do the Advantages Outweigh the Risks? Rogue IT is one of the biggest concerns for IT departments right now. But should it be viewed as a negative, or an opportunity? What I like about this post is that it stemmed from a live Tweet Chat put on by Cloud Commons. John Dixon, who participated in the chat and wrote the post, got to go up against some of the best and brightest on this one.
• Top 10 Ways to Kill Your VDI Project Francis doesn’t try to sugarcoat VDI as if it’s the cure all for every organization. He explains how sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t…and how it’s not about delivering desktops, but rather, delivering applications.

 

To close this out…I want to hear from you. What can we do to make Journey to the Cloud better? Are there any specific topics you’d like to hear more about? Any specific authors you’d like to hear more from? How about any features or functionality of the site you’d like added, changed or improved? What have you seen on other sites that you like that we don’t have? Leave a comment here or tweet us at @GreenPagesIT or @benstephenson1