May 2012 Newsletter

One thing that seems to be trending is cloud storage, thanks to the arrival of Google Drive. There is a sort of grass roots effort coming from the employees who are using Dropbox or Box or the new Google offering as a means for moving their work between their various devices.

According to Steve Hodgkinson, research director at Ovum, employees are aware of the benefits of consumer-grade cloud storage and will introduce them into the workplace, under the radar, if such cloud storage tools are not provided by their IT department. He considers it inevitability.

Source: The Dangers of Google Drive and Dropbox in the Enterprise.

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GigaOM’s Barb Darrow had a story earlier in the year that talked about how CIOs are coming around to cloud storage. In it, Box’s CEO, Aaron Levie, said CIOs are ready to sign off on big corporate cloud-storage deals.

Perhaps we were ahead of the curve with our eCloudArchive managed service offering which we launched last year with our partner Nirvanix. In light of recent events, the timing is absolutely right for all businesses, large and small, to think about and implement their Cloud storage strategy – not only for sharing between devices but also for data recovery.

You can learn more about eCloudArchive here.

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Other items of note:

At the end of April, we announced the arrival of CaliHop to our Lightwave facility.

During the San Diego Business Journal’s 5th Annual Information Technology Executive of the Year Awards, which were handed out during a reception held at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center on April 19, 2012, our vice president of data center operations, Ken Carter, won the San Diego Business Journal IT Executive of the Year award in the small private company division.

On May 23, AIS is a sponsor for the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation (EDC) 47th Annual Dinner. This event is widely recognized as one of the best business dinners in the region with more than 800 executives. The EDC is a group that implements strategies for setting the San Diego region apart from its competitors as a thriving center of technology and entrepreneurship. I am enjoying my role as one of the board members. You can learn more about them by clicking here.

INFLUENCE San Diego recently concluded. I joined C-level executives who were immersed over a 3-day period in regional business and civic issues pertaining to the San Diego region. I feel I now have a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing the region and will bring those “learnings” with me back to AIS and to the various boards where I participate.