Before you call anyone know what needs to be done!!

OK, yes, I'm back, Twitter is great, but doesn't leave enough space for me to play...

So, new year resolution, let's try to write up a bit about life and technology, and perhaps from time to time, a couple of good (or so I think) jokes...

"Before you call anyone, know what needs to be done!"
2 weeks ago, whilst rushing to get the xmas lights out and make the house look pretty again for the festive season (yes, I was a bit late with the snow and all) I found an old yellow pages... With the big sign written on the front page, "Before you call anyone, know what needs to be done!"... I thought it was genius... With so many tools at our fingertips, why not research before you pay...
Hence, I start thinking that this can translate to many areas of life... Imagine, you want to get a new car... hey! why not just go to the dealership closer to home and buy one... or just call them up and ask them to send one over... NO!!! not a chance, that is too much money, so let's research first, get the car we need for our needs... do we need a 4x4? perhaps with the snow, it might have been useful to have one... do we need a frontwheel car? surely... so keep researching and getting to the right one...

Same thinking applies to everything, but many times it looks like because we become a corporate citizen we forget about it... So, if you do it at home... you should do it in the office...

Imagine you want to buy stationary, when you buy for home, you think twice, you check which pen/pencils look nicer and which paper will give you the best quality for your photos, etc. without spending a fortune... so why not do the same for work?
Now let's talk a bit about cloud services (they seem to be what everyone wants to talk about today); so you decided that the first guy who came up on the web will be your cloud services provider... really?
Have you consider everything? Even more important.... do you know what needs to be done?!?

Start thinking what is your "Cloud" for?
- Will you use it for running the Office productivity suite?
- Have you consider that you might want to use several formats? pdf/odf/doc/etc? Do you need all the formats you are using?
- Do you want to use it for HPC? If so, what are you going to do with it? Is your code ready for it? Can you use something like Azure?
- do you need a Storage Cloud? Just getting rid of archiving, backing up and so on will be so nice... wouldn't it? But, can you move your data anywhere? Are you geo-bound?

So as you can see, much research to get done... but the best approach as most of the times is to follow Jack, and just rip it apart to get it right... so start by deciding which is the main goal... then decide what levels of openness/closeness you need to run the company (look into all the legal docs, or involved you legal department, perhaps someone who has a clue about IT will help), decide how green you are or wanna be, then look into alternatives and learn their benefits and limitations...

Is it an Public cloud good for you?

• Do you hold confidential data? 
• Do you provide services for medical institutions or financials? Can they afford to not have 100% control over their data?
• can you hash your data? 
• Which levels of performance you need?

Is it a Private Cloud for you?

• Do you have expertise to run the cloud?
• Can you provide the levels of security you need? If so, do you have everything you need?
• how green do you wanna be? (yes, I know it repeats)

Is it an hybrid cloud for you?

Well, to be honest, I'm bias... From my point of view, most companies need a hybrid approach to cloud services, design their own Cloud architecture based on their own business needs, and then build/buy/collect each of the building blocks for it.

So, once you did your research and you "know what needs to be done!" then who are you going to call? Well, Ghostbusters are really busy these days, so look to your research and check for a company that can add value to your design. For example, have a broad approach creating very rough building blocks, then from there try to get a couple of companies to work the next levels for you. Decide your ERP architecture and get two good, known companies to design the implementation and sign off on it... That will give you peace of mind, and many of the big companies provide the service for Freee!! (oh! well...)

So come on, even if your company is a big one or a small one, you need to know what you are talking about.... and nothing better than getting to read and research... 

Some pointers:

Berkeley's views: http://berkeleyclouds.blogspot.com/

Oracle Clarifies Cloud: http://goo.gl/f9nTa

And Wikipedia on Cloud computing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

But none of the links above replaced our friendly pair of Googles

Cheers, and let's see if I keep my new year resolution... beside losing those 7 Kg.... 

Pablo.-