CloudU Notebooks is a weekly blog series that explores topics from the CloudU certificate program in bite sized chunks, written by me, Ben Kepes, curator of CloudU. How-to’s, interviews with industry giants, and the occasional opinion piece are what you can expect to find. If that’s your cup of tea, you can subscribe here.

When I was last in Texas, I spent an hour or so with the crew from SoftwareAdvice.com who wanted to host a roundtable looking at cloud adoption and some issues around the broader cloud ecosystem. I didn’t realize that the roundtables were actually going to be videoed and so, in my inimitable Kiwi fashion, I turned up to the recording in shorts and a tee shirt – and even forgot to wear a cowboy hat! Anyway, despite the sartorial misadventure it was an interesting session with a good cross section of participants. I was joined by Matt Brace, Senior Engineer at Invodo and Don Fornes, CEO of Software Advice.

In the first video I’m going to write about, we covered common mistakes companies make when considering a move to the cloud and the barriers that still exist to deeper adoption. The video is worth watching but some bullet points of what we covered included;

• Cloud doesn’t mean that organizations can forget about management and control, in fact a move to the cloud makes advance planning all the more important

• There are bandwidth issues for many users that make some cloud tools non-viable

• There are costs that people need to think of beyond the simple cost of service – connectivity, internal networking equipment etc all have their part to play in the economics

• Cloud is about agility more than cost savings – so quit purely focusing on price!

Coming out of the session I was reminded of a few metaphors I often used when talking about cloud adoption. They may be a little clichéd but they’re a great starting point for organization planning their move to the cloud;

• Think of cloud adoption as being like an onion – peel it one layer at a time, don’t try and hit everything in one hit

• Cloud is a sliding wedge – over time adoption will grow higher as more organizations realize the benefits that cloud can bring

• Cloud may not be for everything, but it’s likely for everyone

It was an interesting session and gives some good advice to people beginning, or continuing their journey into the cloud.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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