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Category Archives: Cloud Computing

The Case for Office 365

May 7, 2015 11:00 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Update - May 7, 2015
In the original post below, we talked about the 20,000 “item” limit in OneDrive for Business. It turns out that even our old friend and Office 365 evangelist Harry Brelsford, founder of SMB Nation, and, more recently, O365 Nation, has now run afoul of this obstacle, as he describes in his blog post from May 5.

Turns out there’s another quirk with OneDrive for Business that Harry didn’t touch on in his blog (nor did we in our original post below) - OneDrive for Business is really just a front end for a Microsoft hosted SharePoint server. “So what?” you say. Well, it turns out that there are several characters that are perfectly acceptable for you to use in a Windows file or folder name that are not acceptable in a file or folder name on a SharePoint server. (For the definitive list of what’s not acceptable, see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/905231.) And if you’re trying to sync thousands of files with your OneDrive for Business account and a few of them have illegal characters in their names, the sync operation will fail and you will get to play the “find-the-file-with-the-illegal-file-name” game, which can provide you with hours of fun…

Original Post Follows
A year ago, in a blog post targeted at prospective hosting providers, we said, “…in our opinion, selling Office 365 to your customers is not a cloud strategy. Office 365 may be a great fit for customers, but it still assumes that most computing will be done on a PC (or laptop) at the client endpoint, and your customer will still, in most cases, have at least one server to manage, backup, and repair when it breaks.”

About the same time, we wrote about the concept of “Data Gravity” - that, just as objects with physical mass exhibit inertia and attract one another in accordance with the law of gravity, large chunks of data also exhibit a kind of inertia and tend to attract other related data and the applications required to manipulate that data. This is due in part to the fact that (according to former Microsoft researcher Jim Gray) the most expensive part of computing is the cost of moving data around. It therefore makes sense that you should be running your applications wherever your data resides: if your data is in the Cloud, it can be argued that you should be running your applications there as well – especially apps that frequently have to access a shared set of back-end data.

Although these are still valid points, they do not imply that Office 365 can’t bring significant value to organizations of all sizes. There is a case to be made for Office 365, so let’s take a closer look at it:

First, Office 365 is, in most cases, the most cost-effective way to license the Office applications, especially if you have fewer than 300 users (which is the cut-off point between the “Business” and “Enterprise” O365 license plans). Consider that a volume license for Office 2013 Pro Plus without Software Assurance under the “Open Business” license plan costs roughly $500. The Office 365 Business plan – which gets you just the Office apps without the on-line services – costs $8.25/month. If you do the math, you’ll see that $500 would cover the subscription cost for five years.

But wait – that’s really not an apples-to-apples comparison, because with O365 you always have access to the latest version of Office. So we should really be comparing the O365 subscription cost to the volume license price of Office with Software Assurance, which, under the Open Business plan, is roughly $800 for the initial purchase, which includes two years of S.A., and $295 every two years after that to keep the S.A. in place. Total four-year cost under Open Business: $1,095. Total four-cost under the Office 365 Business plan: $396. Heck, even the Enterprise E3 plan (at $20/month) is only $960 over four years.

But (at the risk of sounding like a late-night cable TV commercial) that’s still not all! Office 365 allows each user to install the Office applications on up to five different PCs or Macs and up to five tablets and five smart phones. This is the closest Microsoft has ever come to per-user licensing for desktop applications, and in our increasingly mobile world where nearly everyone has multiple client devices, it’s an extremely attractive license model.

Second, at a price point that is still less than comparable volume licensing over a four-year period, you can also get Microsoft Hosted Exchange, Hosted SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Hosted Lync for secure instant messaging and Web conferencing, and (depending on the plan) unlimited email archiving and eDiscovery tools such as the ability to put users and/or SharePoint document libraries on discovery hold and conduct global searches across your entire organization for relevant Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint data. This can make the value proposition even more compelling.

So what’s not to like?

Well, for one thing, email retention in Office 365 is not easy and intuitive. As we discussed in our recent blog series on eDiscovery, when an Outlook user empties the Deleted Items folder, or deletes a single item from it, or uses Shift+Delete on an item in another folder (which bypasses the Deleted Items folder), that item gets moved to the “Deletions” subfolder in a hidden “Recoverable Items” folder on the Exchange server. As the blog series explains, these items can still be retrieved by the user as long as they haven’t been purged. By default, they will be purged after two weeks. Microsoft’s Hosted Exchange service allows you to extend that period (the “Deleted Items Retention Period”), but only to a maximum of 30 days – whereas if you are running your own Exchange server, you can extend the period to several years.

But the same tools that allow a user to retrieve items from the Deletions subfolder will also allow a user to permanently purge items from that subfolder. And once an item is purged from the Deletions subfolder – whether explicitly by the user or by the expiration of the Deleted Items Retention Period – that item is gone forever. The only way to prevent this from happening is to put the user on Discovery Hold (assuming you’ve subscribed to a plan which allows you to put users on Discovery Hold), and, unfortunately, there is currently no way to do a bulk operation in O365 to put multiple users on Discovery Hold – you must laboriously do it one user at a time. And if you forget to do it when you create a new user, you run the risk of having that user’s email messages permanently deleted (whether accidentally or deliberately) with no ability to recover them if, Heaven forbid, you ever find yourself embroiled in an eDiscovery action.

One way around this is to couple your Office 365 plan with a third-party archiving tool, such as Mimecast. Although this obviously adds expense, it also adds another layer of malware filtering, an unlimited archive that the user cannot alter, a search function that integrates gracefully into Outlook, and an email continuity function that allows you to send/receive email directly via a Mimecast Web interface if the Office 365 Hosted Exchange service is ever unavailable. You can also use a tool like eFolder’s CloudFinder to back up your entire suite of Office 365 data – documents as well as email messages.

And then there’s OneDrive. You might be able, with a whole lot of business process re-engineering, to figure out how to move all of your file storage into Office 365′s Hosted SharePoint offering. Of course, there would then be no way to access those files unless you’re on-line. Hence the explosive growth in the business-class cloud file synchronization market - where you have a local folder (or multiple local folders) that automatically synchronizes with a cloud file repository, giving you the ability to work off-line and, provided you’ve saved your files in the right folder, synchronize those files to the cloud repository the next time you connect to the Internet. Microsoft’s entry in this field is OneDrive for Business…but there is a rather serious limitation in OneDrive for Business as it exists today.

O365′s 1 Tb of Cloud Storage per user sounds like more than you would ever need. But what you may not know is that there is a limit of 20,000 “items” per user (both a folder and a file within that folder are “items”). You’d be surprised at how fast you can reach that limit. For example, there are three folders on my laptop where all of my important work-related files are stored. One of those folders contains files that also need to be accessible by several other people in the organization. The aggregate storage consumed by those three folders is only about 5 Gb – but there are 18,333 files and subfolders in those three folders. If I was trying to use OneDrive for Business to synchronize all those files to the Cloud, I would probably be less than six months away from exceeding the 20,000 item limit.

Could I go through those folders and delete a lot of stuff I no longer need, or archive them off to, say, a USB drive? Sure I could – and I try to do that periodically. I dare say that you probably also have a lot of files hanging around on your systems that you no longer need. But it takes time to do that grooming – and what’s the most precious resource that most of us never have enough of? Yep, time. My solution is to use Citrix ShareFile to synchronize all three of those folders to a Cloud repository. We also offer Anchor Works (now owned by eFolder) for business-class Cloud file synchronization. (And there are good reasons why you might choose one over the other, but they’re beyond the scope of this article.)

The bottom line is that, while Office 365 still may not be a complete solution that will let you move your business entirely to the cloud and get out of the business of supporting on-prem servers, it can be a valuable component of a complete solution. As with so many things in IT, there is not necessarily a single “right” way to do anything. There are multiple approaches, each with pros and cons, and the challenge is to select the right combination of services for a particular business need. We believe that part of the value we can bring to the table is to help our clients select that right combination of services – whether it be a VirtualQube hosted private cloud, a private cloud on your own premise, in your own co-lo, or in a public infrastructure such as Amazon or Azure, or a public/private hybrid cloud deployment – and to help our clients determine whether one of the Office 365 plans should be part of that solution. And if you use the Office Suite at all, the answer to that is probably “yes” - it’s just a matter of which plan to choose.

Posted in: Best Practices, Cloud Computing, Microsoft, Office 365 ⋅ Tagged: , ,

Seven Security Risks from Consumer-Grade File Sync Services

March 12, 2015 4:14 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

[The following is courtesy of Anchor - an eFolder company and a VirtualQube partner.]

Consumer-grade file sync solutions (referred to hereafter as “CGFS solutions” to conserve electrons) pose many challenges to businesses that care about control and visibility over company data. You may think that you have nothing to worry about in this area, but the odds are that if you have not provided your employees with an approved business-grade solution, you have multiple people using multiple file sync solutions that you don’t even know about. Here’s why that’s a problem:

  1. Data theft - Most of the problems with CGFS solutions emanate from a lack of oversight. Business owners are not privy to when an instance is installed, and are unable to control which employee devices can or cannot sync with a corporate PC. Use of CFGS solutions can open the door to company data being synced (without approval) across personal devices. These personal devices, which accompany employees on public transit, at coffee shops, and with friends, exponentially increase the chance of data being stolen or shared with the wrong parties.
  2. Data loss - Lacking visibility over the movement of files or file versions across end-points, CFGS solutions improperly backup (or do not backup at all) files that were modified on an employee device. If an end-point is compromised or lost, this lack of visibility can result in the inability to restore the most current version of a file…or any version for that matter.
  3. Corrupted data - In a study by CERN, silent data corruption was observed in 1 out of every 1500 files. While many businesses trust their cloud solution providers to make sure that stored data maintains its integrity year after year, most CGFS solutions don’t implement data integrity assurance systems to ensure that any bit-rot or corrupted data is replaced with a redundant copy of the original.
  4. Lawsuits - CGFS solutions give carte blanche power to end-users over the ability to permanently delete and share files. This can result in the permanent loss of critical business documents as well as the sharing of confidential information that can break privacy agreements in place with clients and third-parties.
  5. Compliance violations - Since CGFS solutions have loose (or non-existent) file retention and file access controls, you could be setting yourself up for a compliance violation. Many compliance policies require that files be held for a specific duration and only be accessed by certain people; in these cases, it is imperative to employ strict controls over how long files are kept and who can access them.
  6. Loss of accountability - Without detailed reports and alerts over system-level activity, CGFS solutions can result in loss of accountability over changes to user accounts, organizations, passwords, and other entities. If a malicious admin gains access to the system, hundreds of hours of configuration time can be undone if no alerting system is in place to notify other admins of these changes.
  7. Loss of file access - Consumer-grade solutions don’t track which users and machines touched a file and at which times. This can be a big problem if you’re trying to determine the events leading up to a file’s creation, modification, or deletion. Additionally, many solutions track and associate a small set of file events which can result in a broken access trail if a file is renamed, for example.

Consumer-grade file sync solutions pose many challenges to businesses that care about control and visibility over company data. Allowing employees to utilize CFGS solutions can lead to massive data leaks and security breaches.

Many companies have formal policies or discourage employees from using their own accounts. But while blacklisting common CFGS solutions may curtail the security risks in the short term, employees will ultimately find ways to get around company firewalls and restrictive policies that they feel interfere with their productivity.

The best way for business to handle this is to deploy a company-approved application that will allow IT to control the data, yet grants employees the access and functionality they feel they need to be productive.

Posted in: Best Practices, Cloud Computing, Partner Posts, Security, Storage ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

How Do You Back Up Your Cloud Services?

October 8, 2014 1:51 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

I recently came across a post on spiceworks.com that, although it’s a couple of years old, makes a great point: “IT professionals would never run on-premise systems without adequate backup and recovery capabilities, so it’s hard to imagine why so many pros adopt cloud solutions without ensuring the same level of protection.”

This is not a trivial issue. According to some articles I’ve read, over 100,000 companies are now using Salesforce.com as their CRM system. Microsoft doesn’t reveal how many Office 365 subscribers they have, but they do reveal their annual revenue run-rate. If you make some basic assumptions about the average monthly fee, you can make an educated guess as to how many subscribers they have, and most estimates place it at over 16 million (users, not companies). Google Apps subscriptions are also somewhere in the millions (they don’t reveal their specific numbers either). If your organization subscribes to one or more of these services, have you thought about backing up that data? Or are you just trusting your cloud service provider to do it for you?

Let’s take Salesforce.com as a specific example. Deleted records normally go into a recycle bin, and are retained and recoverable for 15 days. But there are some caveats there:

  • Your recycle bin can only hold a limited number of records. That limit is 25 times the number of megabytes in your storage. (According to the Salesforce.com “help” site, this usually translates to roughly 5,000 records per license.) For example, if you have 500 Mb of storage, your record limit is 12,500 records. If that limit is exceeded, the oldest records in the recycle bin get deleted, provided they’ve been there for at least two hours.
  • If a “child” record – like a contact or an opportunity – is deleted, and its parent record is subsequently deleted, the child record is permanently deleted and is not recoverable.
  • If the recycle bin has been explicitly purged (which requires “Modify All Data” permissions), you may still be able to get them back using the DataLoader tool, but the window of time is very brief. Specifically how long you have is not well documented, but research indicates it’s around 24 – 48 hours.

A quick Internet search will turn up horror stories of organizations where a disgruntled employee deleted a large number of records, then purged the recycle bin before walking out the door. If this happens to you on a Friday afternoon, it’s likely that by Monday morning your only option will be to contact Salesforce.com to request their help in recovering your data. The Salesforce.com help site mentions that this help is available, and notes that there is a “fee associated” with it. It doesn’t mention that the fee starts at $10,000.

You can, of course, periodically export all of your Salesforce.com data as a (very large) .CSV file. Restoring a particular record or group of records will then involve deleting everything in the .CSV file except the records you want to restore, and then importing them back into Salesforce.com. If that sounds painful to you, you’re right.

The other alternative is to use a third-party backup service, of which there are several, to back up your Salesforce.com data. There are several advantages to using a third-party tool: backups can be scheduled and automated, it’s easier to search for the specific record(s) you want to restore, and you can roll back to any one of multiple restore points. One such tool is Cloudfinder, which was recently acquired by eFolder. Cloudfinder will backup data from Salesforce.com, Office 365, Google Apps, and Box. I expect that list of supported cloud services to grow now that they’re owned by eFolder.

We at VirtualQube are excited about this acquisition because we are an eFolder partner, which means that we are now a Cloudfinder partner as well. For more information on Cloudfinder, or any eFolder product, contact sales@virtualqube.com, or just click the “Request a Quote” button on this page.

Posted in: Backup and Recovery, Best Practices, Cloud Computing, Disaster Recovery ⋅ Tagged: , ,

Cloud-Based VDI vs. DaaS - Is There a Difference?

August 29, 2014 2:24 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

With nearly all new technologies in the IT space comes confusion over terminology. Some of the confusion is simply because the technology is new, and we’re all trying to understand how it works and how – or whether – it fits the needs of our businesses. Unfortunately, some of the confusion is often caused by technology vendors who want to find a way to label their products in a way that associates them with whatever is perceived as new, cool, innovative, cutting-edge, etc. Today, we’re seeing that happen with terms like “cloud,” “DaaS,” and “VDI.”

“VDI” stands for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Taken literally, it’s an infrastructure that delivers virtual desktops to users. What is a virtual desktop? It is a (usually Windows) desktop computing environment where the user interface is abstracted and delivered to a remote user over a network using some kind of remote display protocol such as ICA, RDP, or PCoIP. That desktop computing environment is most often virtualized using a platform such as VMware, Hyper-V, or XenServer, but could also be a blade PC or even an ordinary desktop PC. If the virtual desktop is delivered by a service provider (such as VirtualQube) for a monthly subscription fee, it is often referred to as “Desktop as a Service,” or “DaaS.”

There are a number of ways to deliver a virtual desktop to a user:

  • Run multiple, individual instances of a desktop operating system (e.g., Windows 7 or Windows 8) on a virtualization host that’s running a hypervisor such as VMware, Hyper-V, or XenServer. Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View, and Citrix VDI-in-a-Box are all products that enable this model.
  • Run multiple, individual instances of a server operating system (e.g., 2008 R2 or 2012 R2) on a virtualization host that’s running a hypervisor such as VMware, Hyper-V, or XenServer. In such a case, a policy pack can be applied that will make the 2008 R2 desktop look like Windows 7, and the 2012 R2 desktop look like Windows 8. In a moment we’ll discuss why you might want to do that.
  • Run multiple, individual desktops on a single, shared server operating system, using Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (with or without added functionality from products such as Citrix XenApp). This “remote session host,” to use the Microsoft term, can be a virtual server or a physical server. Once again, the desktop can be made to look like a Windows 7 or Windows 8 desktop even though it’s really a server OS.
  • Use a brokering service such as XenDesktop to allow remote users to connect to blade PCs in a data center, or even to connect to their own desktop PCs when they’re out of the office.
  • Use client-side virtualization to deliver a company-managed desktop OS instance that will run inside a virtualized “sandbox” on a client PC, such as is the case with Citrix XenClient, or the Citrix Desktop Player for Macintosh. In this case, the virtual desktop can be cached on the local device’s hard disk so it can continue to be accessed after the client device is disconnected from the network.

Although any of the above approaches could lumped into the “VDI” category, the common usage that seems to be emerging is to use the term “VDI” to refer specifically to approaches that deliver an individual operating system instance (desktop or server) to each user. From a service provider perspective, we would characterize that as cloud-based VDI. So, to answer the question we posed in the title of this post, cloud-based VDI is one variant of DaaS, but not all DaaS is delivered using cloud-based VDI – and for a good reason.

Microsoft has chosen not to put its desktop operating systems on the Service Provider License Agreement (“SPLA”). That means there is no legal way for a service provider such as VirtualQube to provide a customer with a true Windows 7 or Windows 8 desktop and charge by the month for it. The only  way that can be done is for the customer to purchase all the licenses that would be required for their own on-site VDI deployment (and we’ve written extensively about what licenses those are), and provide those licenses to the service provider, which must then provision dedicated hardware for that customer. That hardware cannot be used to provide any services to any other customer. (Anyone who tells you that there’s any other way to do this is either not telling you the truth, or is violating the Microsoft SPLA!)

Unfortunately, the requirement for dedicated hardware will, in many cases, make the solution unaffordable. Citrix recently published the results of a survey of Citrix Service Providers. They received responses from 718 service providers in 25 countries. 70% of them said that their average customer had fewer than 100 employees. 40% said their average customer had fewer than 50 employees. It is simply not cost-effective for a service provider to dedicate hardware to a customer of that size, and unlikely that it could be done at a price the customer would be willing to pay.

On the other hand, both Microsoft and Citrix have clean, easy-to-understand license models for Remote Desktop Services and XenApp, which is the primary reason why nearly all service providers, including VirtualQube, use server-hosted desktops as their primary DaaS delivery method. We all leverage the policy packs that can make a Server 2008 R2 desktop look like a Windows 7 desktop, and a 2012 R2 desktop look like a Windows 8 desktop, but you’re really not getting Windows 7 or Windows 8, and Microsoft is starting to crack down on service providers who fail to make that clear.

Unfortunately, there are still some applications out there that will not run well – or will not run at all – in a remote session hosted environment. There are a number of reasons for this:

  • Some applications check for the OS version as part of their installation routines, and simply abort the installation if you’re trying to install them on a server OS.
  • Some applications will not run on a 64-bit platform – and Server 2008 R2 and 2012 R2 are both exclusively 64-bit platforms.
  • Some applications do not follow proper programming conventions, and insist on doing things like writing temp files to a hard-coded path like C:\temp. If you have multiple users running that application on the same server via Remote Desktop Services, and each instance of the application is trying to write to the same temp file, serious issues will result. Sometimes we can use application isolation techniques to redirect the writes to a user-specific path, but sometimes we can’t.
  • Some applications are so demanding in terms of processor and RAM requirements that anyone else trying to run applications on the same server will experience degraded performance.

There’s not much that a service provider can do to address the first two of these issues, short of going the dedicated-hardware route (for those customers who are large enough to afford it) and provisioning true Windows 7 or Windows 8 desktops. But there is a creative solution for the third and fourth issues, and that’s to use VDI technology to provision individual instances of Server 2008 R2 or Server 2012 R2 per user. From the licensing perspective, it’s no different than supporting multiple users on a remote session host. Once the service provider has licensed a virtualization host for Windows Datacenter edition, there is no limit to the number of Windows Server instances that can be run on that host – you can keep spinning them up until you don’t like the performance anymore. And the Citrix and Microsoft user licensing is the same whether the user has his/her own private server instance, or is sharing the server OS instance with several other users via Remote Desktop Services.

On the positive side, this allows an individual user to be guaranteed a specified amount of CPU and RAM to handle those resource-intensive applications, avoids “noisy neighbor” issues where a single user impacts the performance of other users who happen to be sharing the same Remote Desktop Server, and allows support of applications that just don’t want to run in a multi-user environment. It’s even possible to give the user the ability to install his/her own applications – this may be risky in that the user could break his/her own virtual server instance, but at least the user can’t affect anyone else.

On the negative side, this is a more expensive alternative simply because it is a less efficient way to use the underlying virtualization host. Our tests indicate that we can probably support an average of 75 individual virtual instances of Server 2008 or Server 2012 for VDI on a dual-processor virtualization host with, say, 320 Gb or so of RAM. We can support 200 – 300 concurrent users on the same hardware by running multiple XenApp server instances on it rather than an OS instance per user.

That said, we believe there are times when the positives of cloud-based VDI is worth the extra money, which is why we offer both cloud-based VDI and remote session hosted DaaS powered by Remote Desktop Services and XenApp.

Posted in: Best Practices, Cloud Computing, DaaS, VDI, Virtualization, Windows 7, Windows 8 ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

Is Your Job in Jeopardy by Moving to the Cloud?

July 23, 2014 10:08 am ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

A few months ago, we sat down with a long-time customer who was interested in moving to the cloud. The head of IT was at the lunch gathering and started off the conversation with the following comment, “I just want y’all to know that I am NOT behind this project nor this direction. I cannot be behind a proposal which will remove the need for my job.” I’m sure many cloud conversations have had comments like this. Luckily, based on our industry experience, we were able to paint the picture of what this IT Director’s role would look like after the on-boarding to our Cloud. After we had this conversation, the IT Director said “I didn’t realize that was what I could be doing after this transition. I am 100% in support of this project.” Without getting into the nitty-gritty details of the conversation, here were the themes of our conversation, and it could be the themes of a conversation with your IT Leader.

What we first had to battle were some of the assumptions about Cloud. Many of these assumptions weren’t 100% right, or painted a picture much different than the reality we have experienced. First of all, there is an assumption that Cloud means a significant reduction in IT headcount, especially at the top. This is NOT a requirement for a positive ROI. It’s a business decision, but companies larger than 50 generally need at least one person on-site to continue to deliver to their users specific services that are not cost effective to outsource. In addition, the skills of IT Leadership are necessary in many other areas of the business, especially given the industry and tribal knowledge contained in their brains. IT Leaders can continue to be useful in business-facing roles based on their industry and the tribal knowledge gained during their tenure (discussed later).

Second, some people think a Cloud solution will limit the software options available to the business. The software industry is actually moving towards more and more packages architected for the cloud, so this is becoming less of an issue all the time. Similarly, we have a few clients who installed applets to help with a business process or report, and thus do not want to lose that functionality by using a cloud desktop. Often times though, we find the user didn’t know of the functionality of an existing software installed across the company. The IT Director and his team can view this as an opportunity to show new features across the organization, and the IT Leader is in the best position to demonstrate these features to the entire business, and save the day.

NOTE: Some of our clients have applets which are not designed for the cloud. This can become an issue during the sales/implementation process. One industry known for applets is the legal industry. For more on that topic, see our section “Funny stories from the field”).

Many of the benefits of moving to the Cloud have been described very well over the last few years.  Generally speaking, a Cloud-based infrastructure provides a more mature service delivery model and a higher level of security than many organizations can afford to build into their in-house IT infrastructure. The Cloud can also reduce the cost impact of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies, and can even offer an overall lower cost of IT operations, particularly if the organization is facing a major hardware infrastructure refresh.

These benefits are great, but there also are a number of future-state benefits that will help improve the organization. The IT Leader has the skills that will complement in-flight and future projects designed to increase data availability, improve business processes and provide more analytical reporting. The first skill that will be needed (and can be delivered by the IT Leadership) is effective vendor management. When your technology is no longer a box in a closet, but a stream of information being piped-in through a data-line, the skills for managing the service and the relationship become much more important. These skills include contract management, service bundling, negotiation skills, remaining informed of technology trends, and assessing risk, among others.

Another skill needed by the company will be planning for large projects. Before the transition to the cloud, many of the organization’s IT projects required significant planning for timeline, resources, costs, and risk mitigation – skills that were provided by IT Leadership. These skills are readily re-deployable (and VERY needed) within the business user community.

The business community can benefit from an IT Leader’s perspective on technology enhancements on  native software expansion projects. Having an IT resource to identify a business requirement that will increase the cost by 25%, or increase the timeline by 6 months is invaluable in the early-stage project discussions. While many of the applications and products available to business are standardizing their offerings, these impacts still occur on home-grown applications. The presence of an IT Leader will provide immediate value by increasing IT’s presence and input into current business projects.

We’re not alone in this thinking. In fact, the consulting firm Deloitte issued a report (covered by the Wall Street Journal) identifying the roles/skills that will benefit. “IT leaders at Enterasys, Aricent, and UCSF say business demand for their services is increasing, and the move to cloud computing is allowing their IT organizations to focus on “value-added” activities like high-end software development, business analytics, enterprise architecture, and strategic vendor relationship management.” Source.

The net impact of the move to the cloud isn’t necessarily a reduction in the IT resources (especially the leaders), but a change in the needs of technology knowledge workers. So when you think about it, “Cloud” is good news for IT Leaders and resources, so long as you want to work with the business on higher value projects and increase your own brand and skills.

If you’d like to read more, check out my Amazon Best-Selling book “The Business Owners Essential Guide to I.T. and all Things Digital”. All proceeds go to Mothers Against Drunk Driving – Washington Chapter. Learn More.

Posted in: Application Virtualization, Best Practices, Cloud Computing, Customer Feedback