Tag Archives: Cloud Services

Adopting the Cloud in 2017

Posted on by

With a new year comes resolutions—personal objectives for an individual to complete. Too often, the grand dream of exercising more often does not come to fruition, leading to empty gyms and admissions that the whole effort was “good enough.”

On a greater level, the new year gives businesses a chance to rethink how they run themselves—particularly when it comes to things like cloud systems.

It has been mentioned a few times on this very blog that cloud systems are revolutionizing enterprise data management. The cloud computing industry grew by 25% in 2016 and is expected to continue that sort of progress in the near future. Perhaps more telling is the rapid growth of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) by 53%, indicating a rise in interest in public cloud services.

So, in 2017, let’s have a look at some of the more viable cloud strategies that enterprises can adopt as their own new year’s resolutions. Hey, at least it’s not a gym membership.

The Public Option

Of course, the truth of the matter is that businesses that take advantage of cloud opportunities will fare better in the future that those that don’t. This has caused some degree of controversy, especially among small businesses that may not have the time or resources to kickstart their own cloud network.

That said, even these businesses can harness cloud services through the ever-popular public cloud. If they lack a CIO, which they likely will, they may not be able to enjoy the full benefits of whatever platform they decide to use, but still stand to benefit in the form of better storage, backup, and information sharing.

The Hybrid Option

Everything about the cloud is set to herald in a new era of IT-driven success in business. As a professional in the field, I’m ecstatic to see cloud computing given so much attention in the technology sector.

Despite my earlier mentions of public cloud systems, I believe that a hybrid cloud approach is best for businesses capable of running the private components on their own. Of course, infrastructure is necessary for a private cloud to work, but the speed of having on-site data access as opposed to relying on public Internet is very often an advantage.

Beyond that, one of the great aspects of the hybrid cloud is the ability to “pay as you go” for public services, giving businesses flexibility when more computing power than usual is needed.

Rise of Bimodal IT

Now, more than ever, this is the time to adopt cloud services, particularly for businesses that possess a robust IT department. A 2014 CIO Agenda report by Gartner details the ways that a hybrid cloud model can bring further opportunities to enterprises through what it calls “bimodal IT.”

Bimodal IT, referred to as one of the large components of digital transformation, is the practice of managing two work styles, one rooted in established practices and another focused on exploratory tactics. The hybrid cloud enables this progressive practice by allowing easy “overlay” across existing platforms, whereas companies operating primarily from physical servers may face problems with their hardware becoming outdated.

This is perhaps the biggest challenge that big businesses will face in the coming years. While small businesses may not have an existing IT support structure, they can also adopt cloud services without worrying too much about how it interacts with existing infrastructure.

Here’s to a New Year!

As we continue to move into 2017, it is important to remember that the IT industry is constantly in a state of flux. Businesses can’t anticipate every development that will be made, but adopting a cloud-based infrastructure gives them unprecedented flexibility to adapt to computing demand.

Leveraging The Cloud Against Cancer

Posted on by

Big data has a number of applications in healthcare, from mapping out the genotypes of populations for public health initiatives to creating a more seamless and interoperable medical records system. As part of Vice President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Task Force, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft are collaborating to leverage the cloud against cancer.

Cancer Moonshot Header Image

via LLNL.gov

There are a number of variables that go into cancer research: the molecular structure of cancer cells, to environmental and social factors, to personal genetic factors–and this is just scratching the service. The applications of cloud technology and big data stand to revolutionize the rate at which we can comprehend cancer, and greatly accelerate the rate at which we can one day eradicate it

There already is a vast amount of data on cancer research, but it is segmented and spread across various databases and formats. Even if researchers are able to access data, it is often the case that their computers simply do not have the storage capacity to take advantage of the large quantities of data available.

Earlier this year, the NCI launched the Genomic Data Commons (which collates several large genomic datasets and allows researchers everywhere to add to it) and the Cancer Genomic Cloud Pilots (which provides innovative method for parsing through cancer data). Together these two initiatives breathe new life into cancer research and grant researchers heretofore unheard of access.

NCI Genomic Data Commons

NCI Genomic Data Commons

It’s a known fact that the most successful companies using cloud technology opt to share their data with others. To see government organizations freely share data, collaborate with private sector organizations, and to overall use their resources to contribute to a culture of innovation in cloud technology is a truly inspiring sight. With further collaboration between government and private sector organizations, we can one day hope to have a system of a system of compliance that pushes data-sharing and collaboration across the board.

 

Scott Maurice

Cloud Computing is One of the Most Disruptive Forces in IT History

Posted on by

It’s no secret that cloud computing has revolutionized how businesses buy and use technology. This year alone, Market research firm Gartner Inc forecasts that $111 billion worth of IT spending will shift to cloud services. And that number is expected to grow. In fact, Gartner believes it will almost double to $216 billion by 2020. It’s no wonder Gartner’s analysts coined cloud computing as “one of the most disruptive forces of IT spending” in their report.

Companies of all sizes are being swept up in this shift. From startups all the way up to Fortune 500 companies, buying and maintaining in-house computer servers, storage, and networking gear is becoming a thing of the past. Most companies are finding they would rather have someone else handle it for them.

A number of companies have jumped at the call for cloud services, most notably Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, and IBM. Instead of businesses having to invest in expensive equipment that needs to be regularly updated, patched, or replaced, they can now pay more precisely for exactly the computing, storage, and networking power they use. Renting is the new buying.

“Cloud-first strategies are the foundation for staying relevant in a fast-paced world,” said Ed Anderson, Gartner research vice president. “The market for cloud services has grown to such an extent that it is now a notable percentage of total IT spending, helping to create a new generation of start-ups and ‘born in the cloud’ providers.”

Businesses can choose between public and private cloud models. The difference can be thought of similarly to renting an apartment in a complex vs a stand-alone home. Public cloud models are a multi-tenant environment, where you rent a portion of capacity alongside other clients. Private cloud hosting, on the other hand, is a single-tenant environment where the hardware, storage, and networking power are dedicated to a single client or company.

Public cloud models come with their own benefits and tradeoffs. Their multi-tenant nature allows for a pay-as-you-go model, where businesses can pay by the hour for resources without a contract. A notable limitation to the public cloud model would be that since ever server shares the same hardware, storage, and network devises as all other tenants in the cloud, meeting compliance requirements, such as PCI or SOX is not possible. For this reason, the majority of public cloud deployments are generally used for web servers or development systems where security and compliance requirements of larger organizations and their customers is not an issue. Also, you obviously don’t have control of the hardware performance, since this is managed by the provider.

Private cloud models similarly have their own benefits and tradeoffs. The most obvious differentiator would be the customizability. Because the hardware, storage, and network are dedicated to a single client, performance can be specified and customized to ensure certain levels of security and meet complex compliance requirements. Private models also allow for hybrid deployments for cases in which a dedicated server is required to run a high speed database application. Hardware can be integrated into a private cloud hybridizing the solution between virtual servers and dedicated servers. The tradeoff here for customizability is obviously that corporate customers must still own their own data center equipment.

AWS was one of the first major proponents of cloud-first strategies back in 2006. Today, they are the largest public cloud company following by big players like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM. These companies have completely disrupted the traditional model selling operating systems and software to users on a one to one basis.

While companies of all sizes have been rapidly shifting towards cloud, we are beginning to see a backlash from larger corporations. Smaller companies, used to spending most of their funding on servers and software, see public cloud deployment as a blessing. Startups, typically strapped for cash, can now operate on competitive computing power for just a few cents an hour. However, the public cloud often loses its economic benefits once a company hits a certain size. Companies processing a lot of data might find their public cloud service getting so expensive in fact that they opt instead to go back in-house.

Dropbox has been a prime example of this contention. Earlier this year, they admitted that they have been progressively moving data to their own data centers, off of AWS, for the past few years. Akhil Gupta, Dropbox’s VP of Infrastructure, cited the need for more customization of hardware as a chief motivator. Mainly, the company wanted to change the proportion of storage to computer to networking in order to lower costs. Because the public cloud model doesn’t allow for these hardware changes, Dropbox decided it was time for a change.

Gupta told Fortune earlier this year, “We wanted to build jumbo super storage servers that could hold immense amounts of data with a small amount of compute.” For Dropbox’s, holding and routing user files requires a lot of storage, but relatively little computing power. It makes sense why then, they would benefit so greatly from this specific customization.

This doesn’t mean, obviously, that all companies of a certain size should or will move away from the public cloud. But it does point to an interesting case for a legitimate outlier that doesn’t fit the public-cloud-for-all discourse.