How to Reassure Your President About the Cloud
If you’re a CIO or IT manager and you’re using the cloud for data storage and apps, here are three great pieces of advice that I recently saw in an article for you to use and reassure your senior executives about what you’re doing:
1. Show them you’re on top of the game. Executives want proof that you’re assessing your cloud vendor relationship on an ongoing basis. One great proof you can show them, reports showing results of 24/7 monitoring. They should be easy to read, such as from a dashboard that includes plenty of graphics.
2. Tell them how you know that the cloud provider is protecting your data — and include information on your back-up plan. One good way to reassure executives is by answering questions about where your data is stored, who has the right to access it and what back-up procedures you employ. Monitoring tools provide instant notification of outages and can help you be more confident about letting go of control of your data.
3. Be upfront about the investment. Everybody says cloud computing cuts costs. Well, maybe in the long run. Tell your executives that it takes time and money to assess providers to ensure their security system is top-notch, and that, once you take your data out from behind the firewall, you’ve got to replicate security controls — in some fashion — within the service provider’s environment. Yet, in the long-run, your maintenance, hardware and other costs will drop because you’re not managing servers anymore. Even your monitoring solutions can be low-cost…even free.
