As you may have picked up, I’m on the SearchDataCenter.com Advisory Board. Part of this “boarding” involves answering questions from time-to-time. The current question was interesting:
For this month’s data center advisory board question, we asked our panel if data center managers should consider cloud computing for their operations, and under what scenarios.
The panelists offered very specific advice on where to use cloud computing, and provided a checklist of cloud computing risks to consider, while others offered healthy skepticism about the entire concept.
It’s great to read the variety of replies from the board; as you know from the IT Management podcast we’re all a little cloud-crazy over here.
How much are you paying for your intranet apps?
My answer revolved around something you might have heard me talk about before, namely, IT managers should be looking at low-priority intranet sites and applications and ask if it’d be more cost efficient to move them to a cloud-based (or SaaS-based) service.
Here’s a the start of my answer:
IT managers should be looking at converting their on-premise infrastructure to what we recently called “Software-as-a-Service” and now the bucket of “cloud computing.” If your email isn’t in the cloud already, there should be a fantastically good reason, like regulations that prevent off-premises email.
Can you host your instant messaging in the cloud? How about file sharing and basic intranet functions?
Check out the rest in the full piece and the fine answers from my fellow boardies. Also, you can check out our previous answer to the question of the IT department can survive the economic downturn.
Disclosure: SearchDataCenter.com pays RedMonk a small fee for our participation.
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