Our Cloud Disaster Recovery Story

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Jonathan Feldman.

As a student and practitioner of enterprise cloud computing, I’ve written a lot over the past five years about what I’ve learned. So I’m very pleased that my organization has won a prestigious award for one of our cloud computing efforts, competing against organizations four times our size. Here’s our story and a bit of analysis behind this "five-year overnight success."

What exactly did we win? The Amazon "City In A Cloud" competition, for midsized cities, including a pretty hunk of Lucite and a service credit of $50,000. Sweet. Mind you, there aren’t a huge number of cities even experimenting with cloud computing. Nonetheless, our city, Asheville, N.C., with a daytime population of 120,000, was up against a field of innovators that included Tel Aviv, Israel (population 414,000), Almere, Netherlands (196,000), and Santa Clarita, Calif. (209,000)…

Lest you say this award was all about vendor shenanigans, third-party judges included: Scott Case of Startup America; St. Paul, Minn., Mayor Christopher Coleman, president of the National League of Cities; Bob Sofman, co-executive director of Code for America; and luminaries from The Aspen Institute, White House Office of Social Innovation, and Civic Participation, and other organizations…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/digital-business/our-cloud-disaster-recovery-story/a/d-id/1297431