Up, up and away!

Today’s post is supposed to be about Consilium General Manager Leslie Sutherland's AWESOME hot air balloon ride over the great city of Ottawa. However, due to unforeseen circumstances (although you can see fog pretty clearly), she was grounded. Yet, ironically, fog isn’t a good enough excuse not to come to work. So, with that being said, Leslie is at work less one hot air balloon ride and blog piece.

Because Monday is a blog publication day, we needed to put something up here. I would like to introduce the new topic, which does involve the sky, and that is the Consilium, Stonecircle, Aarluk migration to the cloud. Wait, did I say that right? Consilium, Stonecircle and Aarluk (CSA) are not migrating to the cloud, but all of our files and internal systems are.

CSA will be ditching the old and clunky technology of an internal server and storing everything outside of the office, “in the cloud” as it is called. Essentially, it is the delivery of computing and storage capacity as a service to a community of end recipients (that’s us! Thank you Wikipedia!). Everything we used to run on our internal server will now be stored outside our offices (I have e-mailed Bill Gates to confirm). The migration has already begun and has transferred much of our systems and files to the cloud. This week CSA is moving many of our programs to the cloud, such as Web TimeSheet and Web Resource and SharePoint. A big thank you goes out to CloudIT for their assistance! But, let’s be real, with a name like CloudIT they have to know what they are doing.

CSA is one of the few companies that we know of moving to cloud technologies. But we figure if NASA can do it, that so can we! The sky is the limit, right? Well, maybe not for NASA, but it is about as far as we can go. In a recent article by PCWorld, they indicate that cloud IT is about as safe as any other type of technology if the proper precautions are followed.

To close, Leslie may not have been able to get up in the air for the balloon ride, but for the last little while she has had her head up in the cloud.