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“I have disk space here, but not enough here for a full backup. Perhaps this should go to the cloud. But that’s a lot of data. What would that cost? Now if I went to the cloud that would free up that other storage. Then how can I make the most of what I currently have?”

These are all questions I asked myself as I was juggling my personal photos and music library. As I asked myself these questions the conversation was all too familiar. As recently as the other week, CMI was engaged by a customer to answer these very questions.

Your answering machine; where is it? Or perhaps you are ‘Generation Y’ and you never had an answering machine and have always settled for voicemail.

Like servers and storage, this service has also moved to the cloud --- while providing some very compelling benefits.

Last year mobile devices outsold desktop PC's. Today we are in the midst of seeing a fundamental change in the way our end users transact business. Facebook for example when it started in 2004 was designed to be a browser based PC application. Today they are more mobile driven than ever evidenced by the recent purchase of Instagram.

Like any professional team sport. The owner and coaching staff need to be aligned. Running a smooth Enterprise Architecture (EA) is no different as it requires discipline and executive sponsorship for long term success. But a critical component to an Enterprise Architecture is its governing body also known as an Architecture Services Group (ASG). This typically

In the movie "The Godfather", things that were business and things that were personal were clearly separate -- for a host of really good reasons. But then, overall, life was simpler in the early 1970's. Today: not so much.

As someone responsible for IT in recent years, you have made tremendous progress. By upgrading and consolidating systems, management is simpler, availability is better, and so is your ability to meet demand. You have your arms around budget and operations, and have built a great relationship with the business. In fact -- you feel like a poster-child for achievements like Best Practices and ITIL.

So, the challenge ahead is to move to, or stay in, a model where IT is in synch, in concert, in tandem, in step, as it were, with the business.

Ask yourself: are you procrastinating on Disaster Recovery (DR)?

Better preparation can drastically cut the cost of rebuilding disrupted IT systems. In the past few years, we have seen some significant earthquake events in Japan and New Zealand. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses, there and around the world, have had to reinvent their systems more-or-less on-the-fly. An expensive, time-consuming, and disruptive process, to be sure, even if your firm is prepared for such an event -- and most are not.

Anyone who hasn’t just flown-in from Venus, or spent the day on Uranus, has to be watching the store-it-on-the-web movements of Box, DropBox, Google Drive, et al with both amusement and amazement. This is serious technology playing for serious stakes at home and in the enterprise. Some statistics that just came my way underline my last statement.

Drop, alone, has more than 170 Box-integrated applications, which collectively make in excess of 300 million API calls per month. Gulp.

Welcome back! Over the past couple days I've been blogging about how our clients are using cloud technology to drive costs out of their IT or business environments. I certainly don't claim to be omniscient or all-seeing about cloud technologies, but that's rather the point --- the arguments (logical, business, and financial) for cloud computing (in one form or another) make the case for me. Or you. Or anyone.

Yesterday we started to build the case for the financial benefits of cloud-based IT solutions. We briefly discussed cloud backup, as well as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings Salesforce.Com in the CRM space, and Google's and Microsoft's offerings in the email/collaboration spaces. Let's look at a couple other cloud areas in which we see our clients looking with interest.