Amazon's Cloud Outage and 7 Emerging Campus Tech Skills

El autor de este artículo se declara favorable a la migración de servicios a la nube en las universidades, con el argumento de que "debería permitirnos concentrar mayores energías en la innovación, la enseñanza, el aprendizaje y la investigación". Sin embargo, afirma, las incidencias que afectaron a Amazon hace un par de meses demuestran que las instituciones deben desarrollar nuevas competencias tecnológicas conforme pasan de proveedoras a consumidoras de servicios informáticos externos.

A continuación resume estas competencias en siete:

1. Expertise in Cloud Systems [...] ("Understanding the technology behind the companies we contract with to manage our cloud services will be critical for evaluation, negotiation, disaster planning, and integration tasks.").
2. Development Skills in Proactive Testing [...] ("We will evolve from running all of our day-to-day backend operations to spending our efforts probing, testing, and designing backup plans for our vendor cloud partners.").
3. Experience with Vendor Negotiation, Due Diligence, and Research [...] ("The stakes will get much higher, and choosing the right vendor, and building long-term relationships, will be at a premium").
4. A Campus Communication Focus [...] ("If we move critical services to the cloud we will need to have a robust internal communications policy to explain the benefits of this move.").
5. Educational Value Proposition Understanding [...] ("How does a move to the cloud align with our core mission?").
6. A Focus on Experimentation [...] ("Our vendor partners are not going to innovate for us, as we know our local situation and our local goals better than anyone").
7. Positive Paranoia [...] ("Finally, we should keep in mind that failures (like the Amazon outage) will occur.").