I am a member of too many professional associations!
And I am fairly busy with a range of activities, so as a result I rarely get to attend many of the local meetings and networking sessions. Today was an exception and I went along to the meeting of my local chapter of the Project Management Institute.
The topic is particularly relevant to the concept of resilience – Cloud Computing.
This was a particularly good session as it did not involve death by powerpoint, but a very brief overview of some of the language of cloud computing, then into a panel session driven by questions from the floor.
The panel featured representatives from;
Excellent format for this type of meeting.
The concept of cloud computing, when matured and properly implemented, presents a number of opportunities to organisations to improve their resilience. Like most things, when done badly it makes you worse off.
With cloud models we can change the way the organisation consumes information and communication technology services. This may range from buying “Software As A Service” (for example what I buy from Google Apps for mail and collaboration apps), “Platform As A Serivce” (perhaps an example might be this blogging tool and associated hosting) through to buying “Infrastructure As A Service” (where you layer all the other bits over the core infrastructure offering, such as the Amazon Elastic Cloud services).
Essentially you consume a service, rather than having to invest in a lot of metal and operating your own data centres. Nick Carr wrote a book on the subject called “The Big Switch – rewiring the world, from Edison to Google” (I highly recommend it). Carr likens the early days of electricity (when everybody needed to generate their own power) and the subsequent emergence of large-scale power generators to the idea of “Utility Computing” – plugging your enterprise into the global data and application utility rather than needing to have your own data centre.
Most organisations are not going to be able to just flick a switch and wake up in this new world – it will take a lot of work. It does provide the prospect of offering high levels of agility in how we use and deploy application, rapid provisioning of alternative work sites, enhanced work from home opportunities, and the economies of scale that are needed to build very robust data centres and related infrastructure.
All of these are important features that we look for in our BC and DR solutions.
Some will struggle with one of the most fundamental aspects – it requires you to exchange control for trust.
Do you really trust your current IT vendors?
More importantly do you really trust your own people?
Empowerment and mindful organisation requires that you exchange control for trust with your people.
Resilience starts at home.
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