I think my Director is looking into heading for the Clouds

Nyblizzard

At one of the places I consult for, our Director sent out the IT staff various articles on what is the Cloud and why you should be on it without going into any details himself. Now, this place has a staff of about 8-9 people working from different offices throughout world (Spread amongst 4-5 time zones).

Now everyone pretty much has some sort of job role and specialty but I don't know if anyone there has worked with or is even remotely familiar with Cloud services or Virtualization besides setting up a few VMs.

I don't know in what direction he may decide to go in regards to Cloud Services, but I want to try and see if I can become a big part of that. Where should I start?

GarudaMin

Give your comments/feedback into the articles that your director sent out, I can't give you what he has in mind since I don't know what he is sending out. But start from information security and privacy aspect associated with Cloud. Start from the realization that Cloud means someone else's computer. Sometimes director-level people don't know what Cloud is, they just go along with the trend. But once you translate it for them (cloud = someone else's computer), it will sink in. Ask him, what he has in mind since he is sending out these Cloud related articles. Since you said you are worldwide, talk about what type of information is going to go on that Cloud. It's not about in-sourcing or out-sourcing, it's about right-sourcing.

Khaos1911

Cloud is pulling my hair out, lol. I'm on a project here at work (and by project, I mean 3 of us lol) where we basically have to implement a cloud solution where users are authenticated and provided one policy on location (at work) and outside of location (outside of work site) they are authenticated, but provided a much more lenient policy. Sounds not so difficult but it friggin sucks to implement, especially in all the international locations, Brazil, Turkey, and a few others.

Nyblizzard

Well I will definitely have a better idea once I take a look at every article (I only got the chance to look at 2 before I had to head out, and they were pretty generic). I'll ask him directly what his ideas are and update this thread. How can I better familiarize myself through certification studies? MCSE: Private Cloud seems too obvious but is there anything to bridge that gap?

GarudaMin

It's really hard to say without knowing the context. What is he looking into Cloud for? Is it for data, application, function, or process? Simply put, are we moving information to/from Cloud or are we looking to do transactions/processing utilizing Cloud? But it's hard to figure out all these if you are not too familiar with Cloud itself. Check out CSA's guidance: https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/guidance/csaguide.v3.0.pdf
They also have CCSKv3 certification. I don't know about MCSE:Private Cloud. But CSA is the way to go for Cloud. Also, I believe they are working with ISC2 to create ISC2 cert for Cloud.

Nyblizzard

So he just sent out another email with the title "Journey into the Cloud". I found it funny as he also included a google search for "a companies journey to the cloud". These are the links he attached. I will follow up with him later on

http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/white-papers/h8134-it-journey-applications-cloud-wp.pdf

http://www.ibm.com/smarter-computing/uk/en/pdf/Journey_to_Cloud_Computing_-_from_experimentation_to_business_reality.pdf

https://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac79/docs/EJ-to-Clouds.pdf


http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmware-journey-to-your-cloud-wp-en.pdf