Tag Archives: Cloud Solutions

Master the Cloud With These 5 Books

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Are you the type of professional that is always learning and adapting? Then you have that in common with cloud computing, which is growing every year and becoming more relevant in every aspect of life. If you work with the cloud or are starting to learn, there are plenty of resources to help you out.

In this age of the Internet, there’s no reason not to choose a book that fits your time. Though many sources online are available to help you along, it can be difficult to sift through everything. Here are a few of the best books on cloud computing.

Cloud Computing: From Beginning to End by Ray Rafaels

They say that any expert should be able to write in a way that anyone can understand, and that’s what Rafaels has done in this book. From Beginning to End covers migrating to the cloud along with ways to leverage it in business. As Rafeaels is mercifully easy to understand, this book is suitable for all levels of experience with cloud technology.

Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture by Thomas Erl, Ricardo Puttini, and Zaigham Mahmood

While it can be a difficult book to read straight through, Concepts, Technology & Architecture is a great supplementary reference for anyone learning the cloud. If you want to understand the underlying concepts behind cloud computing, this is the book for you. Erl, Puttini, and Mahmood have taken the time to unpack real life examples for the benefit of the reader, giving practical insight into how to properly use the cloud in daily business practices.

Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing by Joe Weinman

While other works focus on the technical aspects of the cloud, Cloudonomics is a study in the ways that it has impacted business. This is good reading for company leaders that won’t be heavily invested in the cloud, but should have enough of an understanding of its capabilities to know the best ways to use it successfully. Using case studies and statistics about things such as ROI and costs, Weinman paints a picture of the state of adoption and posits how it might move forward.

Architecting the Cloud: Design Decisions for Cloud Computing Service Models by Michael Kavis

Practical and informative, Kavis lays out the myriad of cloud service offerings available in Architecting the Cloud. This is a great book for IT professionals with a smattering of knowledge that are now working on transitioning their infrastructure to the cloud. Even beyond the cloud, much of the advice offered in this book is applicable for IT best practices in general. It’s not overly technical, so you may need to look elsewhere for some of the minutiae, but there are plenty that will find the information here valuable.

Amazon Web Services For Dummies by Bernard Golden

AWS is one of the most popular cloud computing platforms on the market, so it’s no surprise that it’s worth investigating further. Golden does just this, providing advice for implementing AWS effectively. Go into the API that you’ll be using with AWS and learn the functions important to running your business. This book can be used in conjunction with some of the free information that Amazon publishes on AWS for further value and to learn more.

The Big Switch: What You Need to Know About Transitioning to the Cloud

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Even for seasoned IT professionals, a switch to the cloud can seem intimidating. Yet, with more and more businesses adopting, transitioning is becoming increasingly necessary to stay on the cutting edge. With scalability, efficiency, and speed, cloud computing has already made a big impact on data infrastructure and productivity. 90% of companies report using the cloud in some way, according to Comptia’s report on cloud computing trends.

Still, making the transition brings with it an assortment of challenges, particularly in companies that haven’t bothered to update their IT infrastructure for a long time. For any company considering adopting cloud infrastructure, there are a few challenges worth knowing about.

Learning is part of the process

In order to successfully migrate to the cloud, companies don’t just need to adopt new technology, they need to properly educate IT staff on the specifics of cloud maintenance and management. The good news is that using the cloud decreases overhead and requires less maintenance, so after the initial adoption period, fewer resources will be spent on these tasks. While this can limit adoption speed, especially for larger companies with well-established IT infrastructures, it’s a barrier to entry worth working through.

Plan for time, money, and security

Moving data to the cloud is a slow, costly process. There’s no real way around this. When companies choose to make the jump to cloud, they should plan out the execution and research IaaS options before committing to anything. Ensure that your team is equipped well enough to manage whatever level of cloud infrastructure you plan to provide.

Security is another aspect of cloud adoption that many companies don’t consider. Cloud providers are generally not responsible for security—the majority of breaches happen on-site. Because of this, part of planning can involve paying for security in some form, whether through monitoring software or security measures offered by a cloud provider.

Why adopt the cloud?

While I’ve spoken many times on the benefits of using cloud technology in business, any company looking to adopt will need to know how they intend on using it. Simply finding an IaaS is not good enough; businesses need to figure out how the cloud fits into their overall strategy. Many cite total cost of ownership as the primary reason for cloud usage, but in reality, extensive research should be done to determine the platform that is most conducive to a company’s workload and objectives.

Know the costs.

Companies often overestimate the amount that they’ll need to pay for the cloud, moving only a few applications at a time onto cloud platforms. This incremental approach is in many cases not necessary, especially when public cloud offerings can be inexpensive and robust enough to handle business needs. When migrating, consider the services that you’ll be hosting in-house and the extent to which these can save you money in the long term.

Conclusion

Any company thinking of adopting cloud infrastructure should have a lot of questions about how migration can affect their companies. However, if they avoid falling victim to the hype and conduct thorough research both into provider options and their own goals, then they can bolster their IT departments and be prepared for the cloud’s future innovations.

How Artificial Intelligence Can Affect Cloud Computing

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Cloud computing is massive frontier in its own right. Online activity has been redefined by the cloud, and it will come as no surprise that both the public and private sectors have eagerly adopted cloud data storage. But, like the fabled Wild West of yore, this technology is still being developed, with unknown changes over every horizon.

One of the ways that cloud computing is projected to grow is through artificial intelligence, another technology that has garnered recent attention. Many companies have posited that a fusion between AI and cloud technology has the capacity to usher in a new age of cloud computing. Recently, Aaron Levie, CEO of Box Inc., spoke about the company’s recent successes and mentioned that artificial intelligence would play a key role in their upcoming developments.

“We think that AI is going to be substantially powerful for the future of work, and we want to make sure we’re embedding intelligent experiences into everything we do and everything we build at Box,” said Levie.

Learning AI perhaps have the greatest potential to shake up the cloud sector. Machine learning has revolutionized the way that AI communicate with humans, respond to commands, and solve problems. This has manifested itself in a way that many already take for granted—voice-activated assistants such as Siri or Cortana. Cloud computer could potentially work in conjunction to help AI make better decisions and have access to more data. As an AI processes information from cloud servers, it can learn based on patterns that it finds and even send new data back into the cloud to help other machines learn as well.

Even beyond communication, other cognitive services such as image analysis can benefit from having a cloud’s worth of data to draw from. These improvements can advance security technologies with facial recognition software, and assist customers in a way that feels more in line with a human operator.

While cloud learning platforms, such as Google Cloud Machine Learning, provide the first steps towards the synergy of AI and cloud, but lack the deep learning frameworks that may be necessary for future developments. The next generation cloud computing model may be the AI First Cloud, as it is dubbed by CIO. Here, deep learning applications can be better implemented and run on a worldwide AI framework. Additionally, operational management tools could be revamped to allow for better control over the AI programs involved in infrastructure.

Ironically, future work with AI will require a lot of human input. While AI can process massive amounts of data through the cloud, it still makes mistakes, requiring data technicians to note errors and allow them to improve in the future. For example, IBM Watson, a popular AI cloud service intended to fight cybercrime, needs human input to learn about how to tackle different types of attacks. As cybersecurity is always evolving, it takes the efforts of numerous research to prepare Watson to do his job effectively.

The bottom line is that AI and cloud services are very synergistic—AI are able to process large amounts of cloud data, and the cloud becomes more useful when AI can complete tasks by request. An intelligent services revolution is on the horizon, and more experiments in cloud-based AI can help get there.

Best Cloud-Based Apps for Business

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I spend a lot of time talking about applications of the cloud, so I figured I’d dedicate myself now to discussing some applications for the cloud. If you’re the owner of a small-to-medium sized business (often colloquially referred to as an SMB), then you’ll be happy to know that, even without cloud services, it’s still possible to leverage this technology to work for you and improve productivity. Thousands of applications exist on the web, and now, some recent additions are using the cloud to better manage their resources.

Have a look at some of the best services available now.

Intuit Quickbooks Online Plus

For under $40 per month, you can use cloud-based accounting to get a better handle on company finances. From its modest beginning, Intuit has since expanded its services and created a simple, user-friendly UI that caters specifically to SMB needs. It even includes a flexible payroll management service to make it your one-stop shop for dealing with finance.

IDrive

For the business with a minimal web presence looking for a hassle-free way to protect its data, IDrive is ideal. It’s inexpensive and boasts an easy setup that offers businesses disk image backups, folder syncing, and a hard drive for physical data security.

The downside? It only offers a terabyte of storage, which some smaller businesses may not mind, given IDrive’s ease of use.

Carbonite

For slightly larger businesses, Carbonite offers a more robust backup option for businesses looking to protect their data in case of disaster for a reasonable price. However, it does nothing to protect or back up virtual infrastructures or cloud-based data centers, making it so that businesses that are more digitally involved will have to look elsewhere for answers.

MailChimp

Even if your budget for email marketing is low, MailChimp delivers (pun intended) with a level of customization that’ll keep anybody happy regardless of their level of technological expertise. It’s also capable of integrating third party tools, and includes templates to get a new user off and running as fast as possible.

Hootsuite

If you’re interested in easily managing multiple social media platforms from one place, then consider Hootsuite. It starts off free, but an interested user can scale up and add more socials if they decide that the like the service.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer all-in-one analytics; though most social platforms have their own free services if you’d like to really track engagement.

Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus

For a little bit of money (around $20, to be precise), you can protect your devices from viruses and ensure recovery of files encrypted by ransomware. It doesn’t take up a lot of space on your device, scans rapidly, and offers a protective firewall. Plus, Webroot is constantly updating its database of programs and potential threats, and is willing to respond and adapt to any attack by an unknown software.

Ascencio System OnlyOffice

It’s a lot like Google Docs, but OnlyOffice offers a few more options that make it worth the higher price point. It provides additional features that can aid in productivity, including task, project, and customer relationship management tools. Plus, its myriad of functions are all cleanly integrated together in a way that makes it easy to shift from task to task.

Its main drawback is its lack of included storage, but this is offset by the fact that OnlyOffice plays nicely with other third-party storage providers for your convenience.

The Gap Between Cloud Demand and Delivery

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With IT infrastructure changing due to the rise of cloud services, many enterprises have tried their hardest to get on top of these trends. They’d certainly be well-advised to do so; cloud services are ultimately more cost-effective, scalable, and flexible than traditional server-based computing. However, this sudden influx of demand has left IT and cloud experts struggling to keep up.

Four out of five enterprises have experienced unplanned downtime in this transitionary period, with it becoming more of a problem within the last twelve months. Beyond this, other issues, including cyber attacks, natural disasters, and infrastructure problems have put the hurt on enterprises interested in transforming their IT services.

According to a recent poll from Veeam, a disaster recovery firm, around two-thirds of UK-based IT professionals reported that downtime has hurt critical efforts, limiting digital growth over time. Even beyond this, unplanned downtime can damage revenue or brand image and cause incidents when dealing with customers or clients.

The bottom line? IT services are hard-pressed to meet growing business demands, particularly when it comes to data backup and recovery. The interested observer may think of these as growing pains, but until they’re solved, further losses can be expected. For digital growth to continue unabated, better security and backup services are necessary for distributed computing. As a relatively new technology, there’s something of a dearth of experts, leaving many veterans of the industry scrambling to pick up the new skills necessary to work effectively with the cloud. It makes sense; leveraging the cloud effectively involves a new kind of thinking that has not been used by IT professionals.

For the errant wannabe cloud expert, there are a quite a few resources available to get yourself the knowledge necessary to help address the current need for cloud professionals. Of course, a simple Google search will fetch knowledge on any aspect of the subject, but online learning outlets have never been a better place to learn.

For instance, the National Institute of Standards and Technology publishes a great series of guides on the minutiae of cloud computing. For a more structured approach, codeacademy.com offers lessons on the subject as well. However, a lot of the information found online can be a bit overwhelming, so feel free to visit cloudpatterns.org for a better look at industry trends. Maintained by industry professionals, the site compiles patterns in skill and experience among individuals getting hired in cloud positions, and is a great way to stay informed on what’s relevant.

Cloud computing is going to continue to grow as an industry, to the point where cloud services are expected to comprise 46% of IT spending by 2019. In this time, private IT services will become increasingly popular as the presence of hybrid models eases businesses into this new model.

But for now, what the industry needs is highly motivated individuals willing to keep up with current trends and assure that this continued transitional period goes smoothly for all businesses involved.