New Book Review: "To the Cloud"
New book review for To the Cloud: Cloud Powering the Enterprise, by Pankaj Arora, Raj Biyani, and Salil Dave, McGraw-Hill, 2012, reposted here:
The authors of this text rightly explain in their introduction that the path to cloud adoption is bound to be different for every firm. Because much of what is provided here is based on Microsoft IT's own experience with cloud adoption, and most of the software that Microsoft IT consumes is built in-house, the authors point out that they recognize their enterprise is unique, so they chose to focus on concepts rather than specific technologies when guiding the reader through the cloud adoption learning process. While the reader should readily recognize that this is a Microsoft text because the foreward was written by Microsoft CIO Tony Scott, what the authors present here is for the most part product agnostic. And since they share as case studies what they have accomplished as Microsoft IT, it should be no surprise to readers that Microsoft Hyper-V and Windows Azure are periodically mentioned.
The material presented here is broken down into four parts: (1) Explore, (2) Envision, (3) Enable, and (4) Execute. After first discussing the cloud computing paradigm, and the value proposition that it offers, the authors provide practical advice for developing a business case and building consensus with key stakeholders once there is momentum in making a move toward the cloud. The following focus then shifts to various adoption approaches, and a number of topics surrounding cloud execution. Having also just recently completed a reading of "The Cloud at Your Service: The When, How, and Why of Enterprise Cloud Computing" by Jothy Rosenberg and Arthur Mateos (see my review), another high-level introduction to cloud computing that follows a similar line of presentation, as a consultant who works with technical and non-technical stakeholders I see the need for these two texts to share the same shelf space, with this other work catering to a technical audience.
In my opinion, what Arora, Biyani, and Dave provide here is akin to an expanded white paper, due to its format and sub-100 page length, perfect for mid-air reading. One aspect of this text that I especially appreciate is the well executed style of diagrams reminiscent of Harvard Business School Press offerings, which always provide ideas as to how the material might best be presented visually to a non-technical audience. Judging from the frequency and location of dog ears that I left behind after my reading of this book, I found the first half of what the authors present to be material to which I will return, with the parts on Explore and Envision especially well done. The section on "demand patterns", for example, in which the authors describe application usage patterns used to determine best fit based on analyzing user demand and usage patterns, as well as workload characteristics, although brief, was surprisingly not covered as a topic in the earlier work. Well executed. Recommended especially for non-technical management.