Living Out the Benefits of Working in the Cloud

The list of advantages gained by moving business applications to the cloud is extensive: zero asset ownership, anywhere-anytime access, built-in high availability & disaster recovery, and many more. As a cloud architect, I routinely espouse these benefits when talking to clients about future solutions. More recently however, I had the chance to put these benefits to a more sudden and practical test. What started as a regular Monday morning was flipped upside down when the bios in my principal machine decided to corrupt itself (which is a tale on its own). In years past this would have been a major problem, as my gigabytes upon gigabytes of documents, spreadsheets, emails, and applications would have been held hostage by a rather tiny, malfunctioning ROM chip.

Fortunately for me, we at Emergent have already moved our business to the cloud. I popped a Linux live cd into a spare computer, which got me a browser connected to the network, and I working in my normal environment within minutes. With several high priority items on my plate for that morning the cloud had turned disaster into a non-issue, and I didn't have to involve or bother anyone else in my organization to make it happen.

Later than morning, I gave Dell a call, and they dispatched a tech with a new motherboard. By the time he was done with the install it was Tuesday afternoon at 4pm, not that I, or anyone I work with knew the difference. While this is but a short, anecdotal story, it highlights a real world example of how IT in the cloud era is simply better than it was before, and I for one am not looking back.

-Quint Van Deman