Jocelyn DeGance Graham

The interview with Jocelyn DeGance Graham, Founder, Cloud Network of Women, CloudNOW was on the topic of CloudNow: Connecting People In the Cloud and showcased her passion for entrepreneurship, and communications, leveraging technology and serving customers. Jocelyn has been involved in technology for many years, witnessing the evolution of cloud from virtualization and SaaS alone to more platform and infrastructure as a service solutions which serve companies large and small.

The cloud has gone from a nice-to-have to a necessary part of any successful company. Larger enterprises might feel challenged with integrating various versions of legacy applications into the cloud, or choosing more functionality and efficiencies against security and performance challenges when serving so many volumes of users. But it’s not an option to maintain the status quo – the cloud *will* be the standard, and universally adopted, and larger enterprises must find solutions that de-aggregate the risk, providing menus of options to their corporate users. So Jocelyn’s advice to CIOs in charge of this transition-to-the-cloud is to break it up into digestible pieces, focusing on less-mission-critical, non-customer-facing apps and solutions first.

The cloud has made it easier for smaller and medium sized companies who are small and nimble to deliver services faster and better than their more established competitors. A case-in-point is Netflix and their amazingly rapid adoption of cloud solutions, which have literally put much larger and more established, less cloud-centric providers like Blockbuster out of the market. With smaller, more entrepreneurial companies, you have the up-sides of cloud offerings, including a network of technology offerings offered locally and globally with full functionality at nominal costs, coupled with freedom from challenges of larger companies, including the integration of older, legacy apps and the need to serve a large, diverse user base.

It is impressive what Jocelyn has done for the companies she works for, and for the network she has built. She is doing more than her fair share to foster an industry ready to bloom, and serving women (and men) and customers along the way. For her, the bottom line is that the ‘Cloud Got Real’ in 2011, and cloud is out-of-the-hype and into the must-have, so follow the technology revolution, from PCs to internet and into the cloud. For more information, visit http://www.cloudnetworkofwomen.com.