Posted on MTA TODAY on Friday, March 14, 2014
Congratulating the “Cloud 21”
The Cloudmaster Training group. Click here for individual photos of the employees who were able to attend the graduation ceremony.
The accomplishment of 21 MTA employees was celebrated on Friday. The employees – from headquarters and MTA agencies – recently completed the CloudMaster® Training Program, which is putting the MTA at the forefront of the next communications revolution. The awards were given by Sidney Gellineau, chief information officer.
Cloud computing uses a large number of computers connected through a communication network such as the Internet to provide software and data storage that makes information available instantly on an “as needed” basis.
| Open House
IT professionals interested in gaining or improving their cloud technology skills should attend one of two online open houses being held this week for the next round of CloudMaster training. Click here for course descriptions and Webex details. |
Wael Hibri, senior director, Business Service Center, noted that cloud computing is already saving the MTA money while improving our ability to communicate with our customers. “During previous winters, when we were hit with a large storm, hundreds of thousands of customers came to our website for information, causing the site to slow down or crash. And each year we reacted by building more infrastructure, adding servers and firewalls to cope with a one-day-a-year event.”
But the success of the website meant that the next storm drew even more customers, a cycle of growth almost impossible to sustain financially. “We were building infrastructure for one or two days a year, but we were paying for it – buying additional servers and paying their storage, electrical, and cooling costs – year-round.”
Moving the website to the cloud, which was done after Tropical Storm Irene, allows the MTA to quickly ramp up bandwidth for peak periods, which proved critical during Superstorm Sandy. And also during this past winter where we’ve been hit with multiple severe snow storms.
And going forward, many operations – including some of the software we use every day – will be cloud-based.
This leads to a new critical need: employees versed in cloud technology. Working to fill that new need from within the MTA’s talent pool, last February we set up a CloudMaster program with outside consultants– available with tuition reimbursement and college credit from New Jersey Institute of Technology – and gave employees the opportunity to improve or develop their skills.
According to Patricia Courtney, director of IT Consolidation, the skills learned in these classes can be applied to cloud management providing knowledge and insight into moving applications to the cloud. This includes identifying security, bandwidth, network, compliance and risk concerns as well as making decisions about using private or public cloud-hosted solutions. This knowledge gained by attending the CloudMaster training helped streamline the implementation of the MTA All agency Hyperion project (an all-agency budgeting system) that will be privately cloud hosted via Oracle.
Dan Queally, deputy CIO, who was not able to attend the event, also provided remarks: “Many times disruptive technological advances force the MTA to react after the fact. Your efforts to become educated and knowledgeable about this technology will afford the MTA the opportunity to instead be proactive and hopefully harness this new way of doing things for the benefit of the MTA. The MTA has just begun to take advantage of Cloud Technology, and with your help we hope to accelerate the MTA’s adoption of ‘The Cloud’ to deliver services to our clients and customers that are “better, faster, and less costly.”