My cloud story is in Educause Quarterly

I’m honored that Educause has asked me to contribute a piece to the latest edition of Educause Quarterly about practical ways to use the cloud in web development in higher education. You can read it here.

If you read this blog often or have seen me talk recently, you may have heard some of this before, but if you haven’t, I think its worth a few minutes to see how quickly and easy it is to use the cloud for testing, backups and more. My mom read it and thinks I’m pretty smart.

Here are a few key takeaways from the piece, courtesy of Educause:

  • Cloud services can help colleges and universities meet sudden surges or long-term increases in demand for processing, bandwidth, and storage from the campus community.
  • The cloud can also support low-risk, low-cost testing of large technology systems before the institution purchases them.
  • Hosting a large fundraising video on the cloud solved a bandwidth problem for Allegheny College, while testing content management systems on cloud servers reduced risk for John Carroll University.
  • Balancing the pros and cons of cloud services, including cost and project length, helps in determining whether to look to the cloud to solve IT problems.

The story also included a video I did showing just how easy it is to launch a server at Amazon. I’ll embed it here, but if you want to really see the detail of what I’m doing, go watch it at YouTube in a larger size.