How Cloud Are You?

During the TAUS Annual Conference 2016 in October, Jessica Roland, Director Strategic Accounts at SDL, hosted the session 'How Cloud Are You'? This blogpost was written in preparation for this session.

We have all heard about the Cloud revolution. It has mostly been viewed from an infrastructure perspective, with a lot of discussion on what constitutes public, private and hybrid clouds. The pros and cons of moving to a cloud-based infrastructure have also been widely explored. Many companies in the TAUS Community  have moved their product offerings either to cloud-based development models or to SaaS pricing models - or both. Many have also, for several years now, been using tools internally that are cloud-based rather than departmental, whether that's in their company's own data center (private), hosted publicly (e.g. by AWS, Microsoft, etc.) or a combination of the two (hybrid).

Tools now commonly used in a Cloud model include content management systems, translation management systems, machine translation, terminology management tools and translator tools. Theoretically, we are no longer in the fragile situation of having information we need siloed on our vulnerable desktop or department server. We get robust, professional backup, recovery and upgrades from our hosting providers. We can share and reuse content components, translation memory, terminology and machine learning. Let's call this lack of personal IT effort and worry, and the ability to share "Ease of Cloud."  So how much is your team benefitting from "Ease of Cloud"? And has "Ease of Cloud" led to "Speed of Cloud"?

Theoretically we should be seeing the ability to get new systems deployed faster, to move to new versions faster, to try new things faster, because there is a single central system and an army of IT host people to keep it healthy and up-to-date. But is that always the case? And how much are we really sharing content? How well are our systems connected?  Is there still offline work? How often do we still see Excel spreadsheets passed around? Are people still copying and pasting to get content from one format to another? How well are we leveraging translations across the enterprise? Are we really going as fast as we can potentially go?

These are not always easy questions! We have assembled a brave and seasoned group of panelists to tackle these tough subjects at the upcoming TAUS Annual User Conference (Portland, October 24-25). In our session on "How Cloud Are You," our panelists will be assessing their own degree of Cloud-speed, and sharing their lessons learned, their wins and their best advice to help attendees build from "Ease of Cloud" to "Speed of Cloud.