When The Cloud Helps To Get Things Done

Getting Things Done creator David Allen is a familiar figure on the Lifehacker landscape for his approach to keeping yourself organised. Turns out he’s also something of an enthusiast for cloud computing, another frequent topic round these parts.

At the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Cannes this week (which I’m attending), Gartner analyst David Cearley outlined how Allen’s event company has been making use of cloud technologies to develop a more effective set of business applications. The Allen company successfully deployed a CRM system using cloud technologies with minimal effort; as Cearley noted, documenting the system took longer than building it.

An equally important lesson, though, is that the cloud isn’t necessarily going to the solution to every business (or personal) technology challenge:

It’s not always feasible to drop stuff into the cloud. Moving out into a cloud computing environment for their entire applications infrastructure wasn’t feasible.

To keep some of your information in the cloud backed up, check out Google’s Data Liberation Front.