You need your ‘cloud brain’ more than ever

Source – infoworld.com

How we do IT is changing. As it changes, we need to alter the way we think about IT. I like to call that new thinking as having a “cloud brain.”

So what the hell is a “cloud brain?”

A few core attributes include the following:

The ability to stop looking at all workloads as things that must exist in a corporate datacenter. Platforms can reside anywhere: colocation providers, cloud providers, in your datacenter, or on your phone for that matter. Compute is what’s used where you can find it at the lowest cost, and it matters not if you can touch it.

The ability to deal with security as a systemic concept, not a bolt-on. The traditional approaches to security don’t work in the cloud. You simply can no longer focus on tactical security that surrounds specific workloads. Instead, you must concentrate on systemic security that’s pervasive to everything you do.

The ability to focus on how technology can enable the business, not the other way around. Guess what? IT serves the business, and if you forget that fact, you’re not likely to recover. When IT doesn’t think with its “cloud brain,” it becomes a liability for the business, and the department needs—and often gets—a reboot.

Unlimited scalability. Scaling was never hard. What was hard was buying the hardware you needed to do accomplish it. Cloud computing means scaling is only a few clicks away, which removes the risks as well as the costs.

Things are different today than they were even a year ago. Yet many people in IT don’t have “cloud brains.” They think in terms of limitations, not innovation. They consider cloud technology to be a tactical tool.

As time goes on, people who don’t think with a “cloud brain” will find themselves on the sidelines. So … how is your “cloud brain” coming along?