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I had the fantastic opportunity to participate in a live Cloud discussion: Get off my Cloud:  Floating the Risks of Big Data Storage on Huff Post Live during their inaugural week of going live with streaming news and discussions leveraging Google+ Hangouts to bring in live guests.

I couldn't resist this opportunity to discuss high availability, speed to root cause, speed to restoration, security and mission critical services. We sit on the eve of the largest single sporting event that comes around only every 4 years and the recent headlines are, "Twitter Down 2012:  Service Out for Users Throughout the World". I scratched my head wondering how this would look on the London skyline, literally as the London Eye conveys the Sentiment with Twitter as the gauge of status with color and intensity for all to see?

IT Transformation is and has been a hot topic for >20 years. Wow!

Just back from the Gartner IOM conference and recharged with all the IT Transformation talk that is underfoot and success our NetIQ customers experience with our solutions every day.

I live in the Washington, DC metro area, specifically the 51st state – Northern VA or better known as NoVA. Fortunately, I was not affected by the storms and power outages of a couple weeks ago. However, Amazon and their Ashburn data center once again. Once again, many of us social media users found the pain of the outage.

How many outages will occur before plans are put together for better monitoring and DR? One way to look at it is this is their business and livelihood, so DR should be relevant. Another is that many of us use these sites during times of destruction to communicate with the rest of the world, not just for fun or business.

As a marketer and business person, I find it interesting none of these folks have found it a competitive advantage to have the best plan and be alive when their competition is down. However, many are blaming Amazon and leaving for another provider, another provider does not solve the challenge.

We've discussed service management and the transformation that IT is undergoing with the catalysts being the cloud, service providers, SaaS, social media, collaboration, mobility, BYOD, etc. The root catalyst is choice and options in the market and the competition speaks in terms of service value and service performance. I posted a question in LinkedIn regarding how much of your services are in the cloud today and expected to be next year? Join the discussion. The first answer was as I expected, a law firm that isn't in the cloud and isn't going there because of security concerns. I responded as I bet they use services that are internet based, research likely, and thus they are in the cloud. Just like a recent customer discussed having hundreds of apps in the cloud that now need to be reconciled, rationalized and managed for cost. How did they get this point? Easy, credit card subscriptions - cheap and easy to do business with.