By Rich Freeman
Wondering how to acquire the skills you’ll need to thrive in the cloud? Mike Klein, president and COO of cloud provider Online Tech Inc., has two suggestions. First, use your own company as a test bed. “We actually moved our entire infrastructure over about a year ago to our own private cloud, and my team will never go back,” he says.
Second, give yourself a chance to get grounded in the basics of selecting vendors, setting prices, and providing support by starting out with a focused and relatively familiar cloud offering like off-site backup. “Then you can sort of ease into it from there,” Klein observes.
As for pricing cloud solutions, it’s an inexact science, but experience has taught John Stewart of Saber Solutions Inc. a useful rule of thumb. Customers new to cloud computing tend to weigh the cost of buying a cloud service for two to three years against the cost of implementing a comparable on-premises solution.
“If all your fees come out over that amount, then they’re probably not going to go for it,” Stewart says, because the perceived risk attached to the cloud solution will outweigh the potential rewards. By making the same calculation themselves in advance, he notes, cloud resellers can arrive at a rough estimate of the maximum they can safely charge for their solution.
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