Cloud Storage Economics

When Amazon Web Services launched its S3 object storage in 2006, 1 GB of S3 storage cost $.15 per month. For Comparison, in that same year a 500 GB Seagate Barracuda drive cost $300. S3 seemed a radical idea at the time and its simple value proposition and frictionless consumption ushered in the era of […]

The Great Exploration

Today on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing I am publishing “The Great Exploration”, a plan that was presented to me by some of the nation’s leading scientists on how to cost-effectively establish a U.S Moon Base and then continue to build an outpost on Mars. With SpaceX Starship volume launch pricing at $30M for 100 tons to orbit, the launch costs in this plan would be under $1 Billion. The plan is based upon using technologies such as expandable habitat modules that have since been proven on the International Space Station. Notably, this plan was not created by NASA but rather by top U.S. nuclear scientists, including Dr. Lowell Wood who is the most prolific inventor in U.S. history. When originally presented, the lack of heavy launch capacity and lack of experience with expandable pressure modules limited its acceptance on Capitol Hill. Now with the emergence of new heavy lift vehicles like Starship and other advancements, it may well prove to be a viable engineering blueprint to establish a long-term presence on the Moon and Mars within the next 6 years.

To my knowledge, this is the first time this report has been made public in its entirety.

Download the full 62 page “Great Exploration” presentation (44 MB)

Disasters and The Cloud

The unmitigated historic flooding of Hurricane Harvey is an unpleasant reminder of the impact of natural disasters on businesses. While it may not always be possible to protect our physical assets from mother nature, a business can and must protect its intellectual assets. Famous outages at Amazon, Rackspace and others demonstrate that disasters can come […]

Cloud Strategies

The IT departments of Fortune 1000 customers have a long line of vendors knocking down their door everyday to sell their cloud wares. Cloud security, cloud storage, cloud compute are all hot growth areas while traditional IT budgets continue to shrink.

In many of my meetings with IT leaders, discussions quickly devolve into a comparison of vendors. But when I ask the fundamental question of “does your company have a cloud strategy governance document” most often it is crickets.

When the answer from vendors is always cloud, people have forgotten to ask the simple question of why?. A written, executive-approved cloud strategy sets the corporate framework surrounding how vendor and technology decisions should be made around cloud that best meets their business outcome objectives.

A Cloud Strategy Governance Document needs to consider many elements starting with the mission statement of the enterprise which flows into desired business outcomes, and then the high level goals of how IT supports these missions. A strong cloud strategy document ensures that business IT investment decisions are made in a consistent framework that maximizes return on investment and topline growth and profitability of the enterprise