Is Your Business Ready for the Cloud?

My latest article in Smart Enterprise magazine provides "7 Ways to Determine Your Cloud-Readiness." The article gave me an opportunity to talk with some interesting people about key decisions, technology choices, and more that play into an organization's ability to move into the cloud or to expand its cloud presence.

Smart Enterprise is a custom magazine sponsored by CA and published by UBM. Its target audience is global enterprise CIOs.

You can read the entire article on the Smart Enterprise digital magazine site.

More Layoffs: It's a Bad Week to Be Working at Forbes

The New York Times reports this morning that business magazine Forbes is going through another round of layoffs. This follows about 100 people who were laid off by the company in the past year. Some, a spokesperson told the paper, were laid off yesterday, but layoffs will continue throughout the week. (Note to HR people: Don't stretch out layoffs. Do them in one batch on one day. Otherwise, people spend the entire week worrying about being laid off. Kills productivity and morale.)

The culprit is advertising – not circulation, which reportedly has held steady even during this deep recession and despite the supposed uber-supremacy of digital media.

So it's a bad week to be working at Forbes -- though I suppose next week will be a good week to be working at Forbes, since that will mean you kept your job. But on an even wider scale, it's been a bad year to be working at business magazines, with Portfolio closing,  BusinessWeek downsizing and being sold, and Fortune reducing frequency.

Does Forbes part-owner Bono know about this?