Ellen Rubin

CloudNOW award winner Ellen Rubin is VP, Cloud Products at Terremark, a Verizon Company and co-founder of CloudSwitch, recently bought by Verizon and brought into their Terremark group. Ellen started her career as a management consultant, which was a great opportunity to try many things early in her career, gaining experience in a number of different industries and countries. She developed a passion for technology and throughout her career has gained experience in cloud computing, business intelligence, analytics, CRM, data warehousing and data centers, working with engineers and other technical professionals. Her advice to other non-technical people is to take the time and energy to listen closely, do the research and training so that you truly understand the technology, and then translate the business and market/customer data you might have into quantifiable, logical terms that technologists would understand. She also encourages people to ask the dumb questions, and to explain things from the perspective of the customer, without over-managing *how* something is implemented.

Ellen is passionate about the opportunities in the cloud, and sees it as an exploding market with many opportunities ahead. One of the benefits of it being a new industry is that there aren’t a lot of legacy applications or old and established leaders in the market. Another benefit of joining is that it is inevitable that companies large and small will be adopting the cloud – the question is how and/or when or which solutions first. So those who are willing to leverage their skills, do the work, have relevant, transferable skills and background, and willing to get their hands dirty doing many different things will be the people succeeding in growing cloud solutions and supporting the cloud potential overall.

Specific hot areas within the cloud opportunity include hybrid clouds, security and monitoring solutions, as well as solutions that help enterprises and organizations remain in compliance with regulations, providing security and performance requirements while serving a wide range of users. In the end, it will be the companies that make the cloud solutions an extension of what they are already doing in-house, a seamless integration between what’s outsourced externally and done internally, and easily scalable to meet anticipated needs.

For more information, visit Ellen’s company http://www.terramark.com, or find out more about CloudNOW at http://www.cloudnetworkofwomen.com.