I’ve been doing Azure events since August and I’ve come to the conclusion that there are 3 types of people in the audience:
- Want to learn now – a small percentage of the audience
- Have a small measure of interest but never try anything out – maybe over half of the room
- Are only attending to learn how to compete with Azure or their boss forced them – everyone else in the room
I’m guessing the breakdown is similar at most cloud IaaS events. And I’ve not forgotten the those who are hoping that the US government kills off the cloud and wouldn’t attend a cloud event if it was the only place to be inoculated against the zombie apocalypse. And let’s not forget those clock punchers who make up the sad majority of IT pros and haven’t tried to learn anything since 2004.
O365 gives us a great track record that we can use to predict the future of Azure. We are in early days of Azure and uptake looks slow. But it was like this with BPOS/Office 365 before O365 became the norm for email here in Ireland. A few disruptors decided to skill up on Office 365 and those Microsoft partners shook up the market. They became the industry experts and they took business from their competitors:
- By being the only resellers around that implemented a solution that customers wanted
- By having developed skills over time that allowed them to take customers away from competitors that were doing a bad job
The time to learn Azure is now. Don’t procrastinate. Don’t be the moron that thinks “the cloud will never work for my customers” or “my customers are too small for Azure”. Take some advice from Mark Twain:
The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
So you’re serious about Azure but the scale of it scares you? That’s fair. That’s why Microsoft has taken a very targeted approach with Azure-based solutions via Open Licensing. And it’s why I’ve been delivering Azure technical training on a monthly chunk-by-chunk basis. The Mark Twain quote actually covers this too:
The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one.
If you’re starting with Azure, find an on-ramp solution like online backup or DR, and use this to supplement your existing skills. Learn the basics of storage and virtual networking.