Focus on your business, leave your IT infrastructure to the cloud: a round-up - Part 1
These past months we drummed up major international names in cloud computing for a series of workshops. The starting point of the sessions: Focus on your business, leave your IT infrastructure to the cloud. After meet & greets with Amazon, Rackspace, IBM and CSC, you could also hear six Belgian cloud specialists speak during our final meeting on 11 February in Brussels. They gave a bunch of valuable tips to take into account for people who want to set up a powerful cloud infrastructure. For anyone who was not able to attend, here are a few virtual giveaways, starting with one from Daniel Bartz.
Daniel Bartz – ComodIT: “Scrutinise the entire IT solution of an IaaS provider, not just the infrastructure.”
What typifies international cloud computing providers according to Daniel Bartz, besides their worldwide presence and enormous infrastructure with often more than 100,000 servers, is their focus on business strategy, security and support, flexibility, and offering advantageous standard packages as well as dedicated servers and secure clouds. Just like with local providers it is a good idea to read their SLAs thoroughly: do they only offer a ‘basic’ or a more extensive support (i.e. with data storage)? What do they emphasise and what technology do they use?
The comparison Daniel made with the first electric clock struck. In that example, electricity was first merely used to swing the pendulum. Only later came the idea of using electricity to drive the clock. The same can be seen with cloud computing. In the first place companies want to be able to use cloud solutions easily. However, for a cost-efficient solution it is important to go a step further and scrutinise the entire IT infrastructure, including operations and any interesting applications in the cloud.
Click here to view the entire presentation.
This series of workshops was organised by Sirris and Agoria as a part of the Nebucom project. With this project Sirris, Agoria, LSEC and iMinds helps software companies in Belgium explore the opportunities of IaaS.
