Cloud Consultants

Using cloud consultants gives you access to a full range of skills and industry expertise. You extract the exact mix of human capital you need and only pay for the skills you use when you use them. Say you need a team to overhaul your supply chain. Cloud consulting lets you build a team with the exact IT, change management, and operations expertise and executive financial presentation--you can contract a PowerPoint professional for that single project and nothing more. Whatever the extent of your project, you only pay for the exact resources you use. You don't get stuck paying for expensive overhead, idle downtime, or unwarranted mark-ups. And unlike many traditional consultants, you aren't charged the senior consultant premium for work performed by junior consultants.

Unlike other areas of IT there is no professional certification for "cloud consultants". So choosing a professional cloud consultant or service firm is a matter of doing your research and finding someone you trust.

1. Experience is everything! Find out if your potential consultant has done anything of consequence. What other companies has your consultant worked with? What major obstacles have they solved and how did they solve them? On the flip side, if they claim 10 years experience as a cloud consultant, dig deeper, how did this obvious previous experience relate to what more recently has been referred to as the cloud? Some possible answers may include experience in Grid or Distributed computing, building large multi-location data center architectures, load balancing schemes, web server clustering or other elastic methodologies.

2. One of the best and easiest ways to find great cloud consultants is look for those consultants who have taken it upon themselves to create open source cloud related Projects. Find out what was the most difficult project they have ever been a part of.

3. Community involvement is another great way to gauge experience. Places like discussion boards, or various other discussion groups are ideal places to find those hidden gems. They also provide valuable insight into the capabilities of the given consultant in a public setting. Is your consultant a troll who picks fights or are they a helpful member of the community? A quick Google search and you'll have your answer.

4. Blogs have also become very useful ways to determine a cloud consultants vision and capabilities. Although they may not shed to much light on their actual experience they do provide a potential channel by which you could find a consultant.

5. Like any job, interview your consultant. Ask them questions that would gauge their qualifications. Start off by asking them the ultimate trick question, "what is cloud computing?". Good answers avoid the specifics of the technology but instead focus on the opportunities. Bad answers are things like saying "Salesforce" or "Virtualization" or "VMware".

6. References are a great way to find good information whether they were good or bad. Find out what the consultants did, what problems did they solve, what technologies and platforms did they use.