Our primary activity here is matching vendors and other innovations to the best practice standards defined for Cloud Computing by organizations like NIST.

For example one of the key areas that NIST highlights is offline replication. In short when you find yourself in a location with no wireless Internet access, what use are your Cloud-based applications then?

While the Cloud is epitomized by the concept of a centrally hosted resource, this fundamental reality of Internet computing means that ultimately the Cloud will evolve a la Internet, via more of a distributed computing model where local and central collaborate together for ‘the best of both worlds’ so to speak.

The specific NIST term is:

“8.1.2 Off-line Data Synchronization - Access to documents stored in clouds is problematic when subscribers do not have network connectivity. The ability to synchronize documents and process data, while the subscriber is offline and with documents stored in a cloud, is desirable, especially for SaaS clouds. Accomplishing such synchronization may require version control, group collaboration, and other synchronization capabilities within a cloud.”

Vendors provide good implementation examples of these principles, and so the two go hand in hand.

For example one toolset for the Microsoft Cloud world is Colligo. They provide client software that enables you to work on documents etc while offline, which are then synchronized with Cloud services like Office 365 when you are connected.

To the user this is the best of both worlds, i.e. their experience is that they are one with the Cloud, where their files are persistently available online from anywhere, but with the kicker that they’re local too and can be worked on even in the event of network downtime, or -hushed silence- heaven forbid, Cloud downtime.

Hey it happens and the best way to go with it is a technical architecture that is tolerant of both network and Cloud failure, and hence et voila, why tools like Colligo are a key areas for CIO to master. Big user productivity boost from safe Cloud adoption is a good box to tick.