Will Sandy’s winds blow more agencies to the cloud?
November 1, 2012
Grazed from FCW.com. Author: Matthew Weigelt.
A blustery lady named Sandy may be the motivation some agencies need to finally jump aboard the cloud. The full effect of Sandy — the “frankenstorm” that started as a tropical system, grew into a hurricane, then collided with two other systems to become a different kind of devastating event — is yet unknown. But as one former federal CIO said Oct. 31 agencies often have the newer systems and data centers because of their recent transition to the cloud. And those newer data centers, which are designed to handle natural disasters, likely rode out the storm without significant disruption.
“If they have sort of a weaker infrastructure, I would think [Sandy] would be a motivating factor. If they have a very solid infrastructure already established, I’m not sure it would make any difference,” said Gregg “Skip” Bailey, director at Deloitte Consulting LLP and the federal cloud computing lead at the firm. He was formerly CIO at the Bureau for Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives…
Other experts have the same sentiment. The cloud is not the answer to beating Sandy, but it is the design of the new data centers. The new centers are built to survive natural disasters with geographically dispersed and redundant systems. If one center loses power from flooding, there’s another system elsewhere, often far away, which connects agencies to their information…
Read more from the source @ http://fcw.com/articles/2012/10/31/sandy-cloud.aspx