Company Skills needed to use the cloud successfully

Info4u offers cloud computing services for small companies with a staff component of 20 or less. The reason for this is that once you get a  bit bigger you need to adopt a different model with more in-house control and manage your cloud internally.

The skills mentioned below are essentially needed for the bigger guys, as Info4u will handle these for our customer base. Small groups and those that are just starting up are our target market, and most companies  in this group do not have an established internal network, and if they do have one it is usually not very sofisticated.

We hear many professionals saying that the  CLOUD will essentially replace internal company networks, and companies will no longer require the services of highly paid IT (Information Technology) specialists, but the reality is vastly different, as the COMPUTING CLOUD requires a very different set of technical skills and your in-house network team will need to be an awful lot better at security and administrative issues around file sharing and who is allowed access to what, as these issues may fall under the control and management of the new generation of tech savvy staff.

The last item on the list below is one that will tax many companies and institutions in strange ways as there are more and more mobile communication devices entering the market, and nearly all have high end computing powers that will enable them to be used for a variety of purposes including to access the internet and access company cloud computing files. Mobile App development  and related infrastructure will be the leading IT (Information Technology) requirement in all office environments of the future.

You will need to evaluate your technical network staff for the following 8 primary skill sets

1) business and financial
2) Technical skills
3) Enterprise architecture and business needs analysis
4) Project management skills
5) Contract and vendor negotiation
6) Security and compliance
7) Data integration and analysis skills
8) Mobile app development and management    

read more here  in this article by Joe McKendrick, 

As the cloud grows in stature and more companies start to move over to the cloud the last 3 items in the list above will  become more important.  The amount of online data is growing astronomically as online storage becomes cheaper and government regulatory bodies require more stringent compliance with laws like the FICA (The Financial Intelligence Centre Act, 2001),  RICA (Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-related Information Act, 2002 ) and (Promotion of Access to Information Act, 2000 (Act 2 of 2000)) that we have in South Africa. Other counties have similar laws demanding that financial and online records are kept by all parties in any financial or online activity, and that these are made available to government inspectors at any time.

Then there is public data and the social media explosion that also places large quantities of data online and available to the public.The number of company, organisation and personal websites is also growing at an alarming rate, which is predicted to increase as more online storage within the cloud computing arena becomes available due to the drop in cost per unit of storage space, as well as the drop in cost for online data transfer which was a significant issue in the past.

Is your business online and in the cloud yet? 

If you are a small company or organization with less than 20 individuals then contact admin@info4u.co.za for more information or visit our pages at www.info4u.co.za