By Shahin Pirooz

For more than a decade now, I’ve witnessed the evolution of the cloud services market and have had a hand in bringing the many benefits of the cloud to the mid-sized enterprise market in my role as CTO of CenterBeam.

In this blog, over the next several months, I plan to discuss some of the hot topics in the cloud community, and offer ideas about ways in which your company can implement enterprise-class cloud solutions to improve employee productivity, minimize security threats and more effectively manage all of your IT resources – whether public or private, or in the cloud or on premises.

First up on my list of topics will be what to move to the cloud, and when. When considering a move to the cloud, you need to realize that it’s not as simple as eliminating your physical network infrastructure and software and moving everything to a hosting company. Not every aspect of your business can be easily and effectively moved into the cloud, so you must do your homework to ensure that the hosted services – as well as the cloud provider itself – can deliver the true benefits you wish to achieve.

On the agenda for future blog posts will be mobile device management – or how to deal with employees that subscribe to a “Bring Your Own Device” mentality, preferring to use their own iPads or smartphones, rather than ones provided to them by the company. We’ll also explore the issue of cloud security, including how to ensure that your vital corporate data remains secure,; as well as how you can create a single way to dynamically manage all of your resources across the technology stack. We’ll conclude with a look at some of the myths surrounding Big Data, and the strategies that CIOs can employ with regard to storing documents onsite or in the cloud to improve access to the right data at the right time.