Journey to the Cloud

As you can see from the diagram below no company other than Microsoft has so many cloud solutions that you can apply to solving your business needs.

What this means for Independent Software Vendors and Partners is that we have truly entered a new generation of Information Technology. No product or service can be successful without taking the cloud into consideration.

You can leverage the cloud in 3 key ways.  You can move things to the cloud like outsourcing email with Office 365. You can utilize the cloud by running applications in the Windows Azure Platform. And/or you can build your own private cloud on-premise and deliver IT as a service. You can also build Hybrid Clouds that combine the best of both on-premise and public clouds.

Outsource to the cloud – Using Microsoft’s Software as a Service (SaaS) public cloud offering Office 365 (Office, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync Online) you can purchase a business process such as email  which is delivered at a business relevant SLA. 

In addition to the components of Office 365 Microsoft also offers Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in the cloud with CRM Online and all the consumer focused Live Services such as Bing, Hotmail, Messenger and more.

You can also outsource processing to one of the many 3rd party hosting companies that base their offerings on the Microsoft product stack.

Leverage the cloud – Using Microsoft’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) public cloud offering, the Windows Azure Platform, you can build and run applications on a Microsoft provided service oriented global data center infrastructure. 

Be the cloud –  You can build your own Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) private cloud in your own data center utilizing Hyper-V and the Hyper-V Cloud tooling, guidance and partnerships.

For more on your cloud options see the Microsoft Cloud Power web site.

To the Cloud.

Bill Zack