Cloud News: Cloud is more than IT, Office 365 Compliance, Google in LA, Cloud App of the year?
Hello folks!
One last roundup of the interesting bits of Cloud news before the holidays commence.
1. Banging a message home. – I know I sounds little like a stuck record on this but it keeps coming up and we have to make sure we address it. The adoption of Cloud services affects more than just the IT side of things. There’s an article at Federal Times which uses the adoption of online services by the US Department of Labour and shows that:
“Labor has experienced challenges with its move to a cloud environment. In addition to going from a legacy, batch system to a “real time” system, issues related to training and process changes arose. These changes ran the spectrum of financial management activities, to include human resources, travel, procurement and invoicing.”
If you’re having a technology conversation about adoption, it’s important to ask questions about their processes and whether an impact analysis has been thought about beyond the confines of the IT domain.
2. Talking about workloads – building on the nontechnical approach I mentioned above, we’ve been proposing the ‘workload’ view of things for a long time in the workshops and it seems so have IBM. In an article at Thoughts On Cloud, Luis Aguilar Mateo has put together a nice article which is useful reference reading and has a good graphic at the end which is worth .. Erm remembering or else copying and providing the correct attribution! 
3. New Office365 security and compliance news! Office 365 now meets EU data protection standards through support for the European Commisions “Model Clauses” safeguarding data even if it’s held outside of Europe. There’s also a new web site which you should all bookmark and remember – http://trust.office365.com which provides a whole slew of good solid information which should be used in those Microsoft vs conversations. Quote time:
“Microsoft will begin to include Model Clauses by default to all customers all over the world. I think we are the only cloud provider of any scale that’s offering this service, and it differentiates Office 365.” says Stephen McGibbon, chief technology officer for Microsoft EMEA
NOTE: This still doesn’t protect against access to data through FISA or Patriot act which could still be a sticking point for a lot of orgs.. Always tempering the hype – that’s me!
4. LAPD says NO! I’ve used them as an example for a long time now, but it seems that the LAPD has finally said no to using Google for it’s email. This is a pretty significant knock-back for the big-G. Of course they’ll spin it saying that the rest of the city has moved over, but LAPD represents 13,000 users, the rest of the city is 17,000. By my count that’s 43% of the user base which are no not going to be moving to the Apps solution, a big hit! The city council came to the conclusion that “… the company’s technology could not meet the security needs of crucial departments including police and the city attorney’s office.”
The LA times has the article I found.
5. Office 365 – Cloud app of the year! Finishing of a high note, CRN have voted Office 365 their Cloud App of the year saying it was “the real deal and blows away Google Apps”. That’s it.. Job done.
Have a good one!
John
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