July 27th, 2012
If you want to learn what the crazy buzz is all about surrounding cloud computing, then better listen up. For years cloud computing has been in the scene, growing bigger not only in its market but also in its offered technologies that aim for the specific needs of its targeted consumers. Cloud computing companies know exactly what can generate millions of users based on their daily activities that are made easy by accessing various software online.
For those living under a shell, there has been a new wave of applications made available without having to drain your personal savings in purchasing that software. Cloud applications which are often referred to as Software-as-a-Service have certainly made an impact on the lives of businessmen, on-the-go professionals and the youth who mainly patronize these applications. As mentioned, one of the main reasons for such constant support is the opportunity to cut on costs not only on the software application but also in the installation, maintenance, technical support, and purchase of computers with higher memory or faster performance. Look at it this way, if you own a small IT company, you’d be able to reduce your overhead with fewer hardware, fewer employees to monitor each hardware and fewer customer service agents to face irritated consumers that use different versions of the product instead of just one uniform version online.
On the part of the end-user, cloud applications allow for the most needed convenience they have been searching for in their, well, digital life. One of the most basic and popular examples of this incredible benefit is Google Docs which provides the platform for anyone to create, store and share documents and spreadsheets with intended people. The capability to store information somewhere that you cannot really touch or hold but is definitely and often securely there is the bread and butter of cloud applications. Without having to get stuck on your desktop computer at home, you can access any information or file on the cloud by just bringing your laptop or mobile phone anywhere with a simple connection to the Internet. The flexibility of these applications makes them a sure-fire hit with the modern consumer.
Sharing of these data also requires minimal time and effort instead of slow uploading, sending via email or saving on flash drives. No matter where the intended addressee is, he can easily get a hold of these files by just connecting to the internet. Dropbox is also a good example of this main feature. Pictures often have high resolution and take a longer time to upload or attach. By just sharing a folder in Dropbox, anyone can quickly view and have a copy of their most cherished photos.
The storage capability of these cloud applications also come in handy for any user when their main computers break down. By having their files on the cloud, they immediately have a back-up drive that won’t just crash at any moment. These applications are as we have said, quite inexpensive compared to the back up hardware that you could be paying for especially for big businesses. Scalability is also a strong suit for any of these cloud applications since user needs are often diverse and changing as the need arises.
The scope of services offered by cloud applications is also evolving and getting better by the hour. More than storage functions, available cloud applications now conquer customer relationship management, sales database, and finance applications among others. While some simple applications are free, others could charge the consumer but at a very affordable price than actually hiring someone to build and run a needed database.
The only hard pill to swallow with regard to cloud applications is the question of security for any shared information online. Since you are basically putting your information out there, confidentiality is put to the test especially for the cloud hosting company. How safe will your data be on the cloud when control is primarily not in your hands? The guarantee that it won’t be used by the company for advertising campaigns or be uploaded into Youtube should be your one and only motivation to find a cloud application that provides a highly secure and safe environment that respects your privacy. For all its immense benefits, cloud applications must first and foremost uphold what they promise, which is ultimate customer service including strict user protection.
Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.
About the Guest Author:
Rodolfo Lentejas, Jr. is a fulltime freelance writer based in Toronto. He is the founder of the PostSckrippt, a growing online writing business dedicated to producing top quality, original and fresh content. To know more about him, please visit www.postsckrippt.ca. Like him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.
July 26th, 2012
One of the aspects of this year’s E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) that caught the attention of most of the people covering the event was that no new gaming consoles or major hardware were on display. While many gamers were disappointed at this, perhaps this is a sign of the times. After all, many industry experts have noted that the future of gaming is probably in cloud computing and, in a world of cloud-based gaming, hardware on the client side is irrelevant.
Particularly in Japan, Sony’s purchase of Gaikai, a pioneer of cloud gaming infrastructure and technology, makes it likely that Sony will soon be able to offer high-quality streaming games to PlayStation owners. Perhaps the PlayStation 4 will no longer require actual game discs and will stream all of its games? One of the great things about device virtualization is that it is easy to envision a future where gamers can receive their games on any device, from tablet PCs and smartphones to many modern TV devices. In fact, cloud computing may be used to prolong the lives of current consoles considerably since client-side processing is not nearly as demanding with cloud gaming due to the fact that cloud gaming is a basic Hardware as a Service (HaaS) operation. We can already see this happening in Japan and other countries with a high average connection speed, although we are still a few years away from gamers being able to stream blockbuster games with high system requirements at ideal speeds and quality.
Cloud Gaming Allows Gaming Companies to Offer Better Backwards Compatibility
One of the most promising uses of cloud computing and streaming for gaming companies is bringing backwards compatibility to their newer systems and consoles. Many factors, such as the fact that many older games are freely available due to software piracy or that releasing them again on physical media is prohibitively expensive, make backwards compatibility impractical for many gaming companies. However, not allowing gamers to access these older games means not tapping into an available market and having this wealth of older games lying around is a considerable waste of potential. Fortunately, the fact that these older games do not have heavy system requirements makes them ideal for streaming. By placing them on the cloud and establishing a payment model per transaction, Sony, Nintendo, and other gaming companies could conceivably make their whole back catalog available for streaming.
Cloud Gaming Solves Many of the Industry’s Most Important Problems
Since its beginnings, the gaming industry has been at the mercy of retailers and distributors. After all, no matter how good your game is, if it does not hit the store shelves it will probably not make any money. It is very common for developers to have to make numerous concessions, in everything from pricing to content. However, cloud gaming enables a new model that places less power in the hands of the middleman and gives more freedom to developers. Not having to manufacture physical media will also allow greater profits while giving companies the freedom to reduce the price of their games substantially. However, the most obvious and attractive feature of cloud gaming is how it solves the problems of software piracy and the pre-owned market.
Companies spend millions of dollars every year implementing expensive DRM which ultimately prove ineffective while also alienating loyal customers. Within a couple of weeks, almost all games are pirated and available for free on peer-to-peer file sharing networks, despite the efforts of gaming companies. However, with a streaming gaming model, the actual games’ code will not be available to be pirated at all and thanks to the fact that the actual games are not on the clients’ side, it effectively neuters the second-hand market.
Cloud Gaming’s Availability
Unfortunately, due to bandwidth caps and low connection speeds and availability in many countries, effective high-end cloud gaming is probably a few years away from being a worldwide phenomenon. However, there is no doubt that countries such as Japan or South Korea, where the infrastructure already exists, are ready to adopt this technology now. And, as seen at E3 and in recent news, it seems that the major gaming companies are betting on the cloud as the future of PC gaming.
Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.
About the Guest Author:
Nida Rasheed is a freelance writer and owner of an outsourcing company, Nida often finds herself wanting to write about the subjects that are closest to her heart. She lives in Islamabad, Pakistan and can be found on Twitter @nidarasheed.
July 25th, 2012
Without realizing it, many people have been using the cloud even before the term became widely known to both consumers and businesses. Applications such as email and other programs which are web based and accessed over the internet are in reality, cloud applications. The concept of web-based applications such as Hotmail and Gmail as well as instant messenger, social networking and other apps which can be accessed from any location with an internet connection are early forms of cloud computing.
The increased use of mobile devices which potentially mark the decline of the PC era and the upward trend of cloud computing has prompted the demand for being able to access content from anywhere and from any type of device. Gartner predicts that the demand will only continue to accelerate over the next few years.
What Gartner Says about the Future of Cloud Computing
Gartner, a leading information technology research company since 1979, recently released a report outlining the growth of cloud computing storage within the next few years. The research firm pointed out that the amount of content stored in the cloud during the year 2011 was less than 8 percent.
The amount of cloud computing storage is expected to increase to approximately 36 percent by the year 2016, according to Gartner. This figure points to the fact that more users of cloud computing storage will be moving at least one-third of their content to the cloud by 2016.
Japan and South Korea to Experience the Highest Growth in Cloud Computing
Since cloud computing is based on a pay-as-you-go model and provides a cost effective way to share technology resources, the concept of cloud computing represents a way for organizations to reduce IT costs. According the International Data Corporation (IDC), a leading global provider of market intelligence for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets, organizations worldwide generated revenue of more than $600 billion and created more than 1.2 million jobs during the year 2011 as the result of using cloud computing services.
The IDC study also showed that more than fifty percent of the employment positions created during 2012 will be in the small to medium-sized business sectors. A high percentage of this growth will originate from the United States and Western Europe with Japan and South Korea experiencing the highest growth in the use of cloud computing in the Asia Pacific, according to Gartner.
Gartner Forecasts for Cloud Computing Storage
Gartner forecasts an increase in the use of cloud computing as the result of technologically advanced smartphones, tablet PCs, handheld gadgets and other portable devices which are capable of producing multimedia content which in turn, increases storage demands. Gartner continues to explain that the increase in storage demands for digital content is also the result of social media networking sites such as Facebook which also strive to meet the storage demands for the consumer. However, the amount of storage offered to the consumer is relatively small compared to other cloud storage resources, according to Gartner. Regardless, consumers will be able to store and share multimedia on various social media sites which offer storage space free of charge.
All of these studies point to the fact that cloud computing storage and services are on the rise and the upward trend will continue through 2016.
Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.
About the Guest Author:
Aeyne Schriber has more than two decades of accumulated experience in IT security, computer technology, and internet marketing, including technology education and administration field both on the public school and college level. She works worldwide helping companies establish an online presence from small businesses to large enterprises. Her skills as a published copywriter and marketer also include consulting and training corporate personnel and entrepreneurs. For more details, visit www.digitalnewmediamarketing.com
July 24th, 2012
A great result of the expansion of cloud computing services has been the democratization of IT services. Companies that could only afford basic IT can now go in for full-fledged ERP solutions. However, while the cost barrier has been broken, the knowledge and skill barriers still remain. Not every small and medium business can afford to start out with staff that can guide the company to proper utilization of cloud based services. Many CEOs, too busy with the day to day running of their companies may not even have the time to study the subject.
New capabilities in Cloud Computing have gone way beyond simple storage of data. With full fledged applications being run over the cloud, there are complex issues of integration, security and relationship management. If the busy CEO does not have the time to manage these issues, he would perhaps give up for the moment and decide to look at the issue when he can afford to hire an IT staff. This is a pity. IT and the proper use of cloud computing can add wings to his business but he has no option but to put it on hold because he can’t afford the staff or invest his own time.
That is where cloud brokerage comes in. Brokerages serve as intermediaries between the cloud service provider and the end user. They help the end user overcome the complexity and get the service he needs.
The cloud broker need not be a person. It could be software or a suite of technologies that will aggregate the services that a user needs (these could even be available with different vendors) and package them in way that the end user gets a complete package that fits his business needs closely. If the company were to achieve the same result through its own manpower, it would have to fritter away precious resources in hiring IT skills. It is far more cost effective to use the services of a broker if your cloud computing needs are well defined and do not need extensive customization.
There are three parts of the service that a broker provides:
Cloud brokerage becomes even more critical if you are in an industry where there are several regulatory requirements for the business to run. Using specialist brokers who understand your industry and its regulatory requirements is an industry wide best practice and it ensures that your business will stay compliant.
There are three categories of cloud brokers available today. These are Intermediation Brokers, Aggregators and Cloud Arbitrage Services. The services they provide are described below -
If you are a company that is still in a rapid growth phase, using cloud brokerage would permit you to get the best of the breed cloud solutions without needing to hire a full time IT staff. Your IT solutions can grow with your company without ever becoming a non-productive drain.
Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.
About the Guest Author:
Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.
July 23rd, 2012
It is no longer news that public cloud technology provides an unparalleled flexibility and speed when compared with hosting IT infrastructures on rigid and slow traditional servers.
The dream of every new start-up is to grow and expand its business operations. The projected period of growth might be in months or years. However, due to favorable business environments, some new companies suddenly find themselves expanding at an alarming rate that they will have to increase their server capacity, storage usage, and application of improved security systems.
Samba Tech is a typical example to demonstrate that companies should adopt cloud technology in advance so as to be able to withstand sudden growth that may threaten the survival of their businesses. Samba Tech was founded in 2008, as an online video delivery, exploring the untapped market for this type of business in Brazil.
And within three years of operations, serving some international media companies like Viacom, Bloomberg, and ESPN as a platform for delivering online video content to Latin American viewers, Samba’s revenue rose by a whopping 200 percent to about $2.8million. This could be described as a surprising growth level for a three-year-old start-up.
Expectedly, Samba Tech began to face the serious threat to its business operations due to sudden increase in storage, server, security, and IT management requirements. The company initially had no plan to handle its IT systems; so, Samba started with a local hosting service with limited storage capacity, limited number of servers and poor IT management procedures which eventually led to poor video quality and dissatisfied customer services. To prevent a colossal collapse of the company, the management of Samba opted for public cloud, which not only provided flexibility in the area of scaling up and down the amount of storage usage, server capacity and the introduction of enhanced IT security systems, but also helped Samba to deal with sudden hike in IT infrastructure requirements, especially when additional processing power was needed. For instance, when there were popular sporting events on ESPN or new marketing campaigns on other channels that used Samba Tech, the adoption of public cloud afforded the company the unique opportunity of scaling up its IT systems (that were based in the cloud) to meet these new requirements at a faster rate and at a moderately affordable cost.
And here is the final summation from Samba Chief Technology Officer, Fernando Campos: “It’s difficult to foresee when we will need additional capacity, but while traditional servers can take weeks to deploy, public cloud servers take less than 30 seconds. If the cloud technology wasn’t available, we couldn’t have grown as fast as we have.”
This case study reveals two important facts about running any company:
But should companies wait until unexpected growth and expansion make their businesses virtually inoperable before adopting the public cloud technology? In the words of Samba’s Chief Technology Officer, a sudden change or growth is almost impossible to predict: hence, strategic managers should be able to safeguard the operations of their companies by migrating their IT structures to the cloud in anticipation for future growth. It is dangerous to allow a company with a rigid traditional hosting system to confront an unexpected increase in IT infrastructure requirements! If this situation is not properly managed, it could lead to the sudden collapse of the company and create poor customer satisfaction.
Obviously, the public cloud technology does not only provide great opportunity for companies to expand at any rate they could, but also reduces the overhead cost of running these companies. This is basically in line with the new mantra of cost-efficiency, which is fast gaining currency in the corporate world.
Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.
About the Guest Author:
Jerry Olasakinju, a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) degree holder, is a passionate researcher and writer whose interest in everything computing is unparalleled. He blogs about his literary works at http://jerryolasakinju.blogspot.jp/
July 20th, 2012
In any type of business, data and information are the foundation on which a company stands, grows and succeeds. As the world of technology evolves, most if not all companies have understood the power of building an online presence to further their business. Creating a website to promote a business has been an effective means to build brand awareness, reach a wider demographic, and increase sales. Traditional IT systems have been utilized to secure the data being used by companies in their websites. However, as the digital age continues to progress, revolutionary virtual data centers have emerged to provide the needed affordability and flexibility through the birth of cloud hosting.
With the proliferation of various cloud hosting service providers, companies have the option to control their systems online instead of conventional hardware that could face several technical failures. By hosting their sites on the cloud, data are stored and maintained on virtual servers that are often distributed in different locations. Since data is the most important tool to communicate a company’s goals, products and services, a cloud hosting provider offers companies intensified security by backing up their data on several servers. With hardware systems, users could duplicate their data on disks, flash drives, or save it on several computers to ensure that data won’t be lost. Much like this set-up, cloud hosting provides customers with security assurance by copying and saving the same data on other servers if an unanticipated problem occurs.
Since systems could crash down or experience delays due to human error, malware, operational malfunction, outages or natural disasters, it is crucial for cloud hosting providers to give a sense of safety and protection for its clients through the practice of redundancy. The amount of loss or damage brought by downtime on a company’s website is unimaginable for any business owner. Instead of getting more visitors to learn about their company or more consumers to patronize their product, a blank or frozen page is displayed on their computers. One could only imagine the amount of money lost during this downtime and companies cannot afford for this incident to occur. This is why when cloud hosting services are availed, redundancy is a vital feature to look for.
However, when data are stored by a single provider on its different data centers, companies still face the risk of losing their data if the whole operation of that single provider bogs down. The answer to this high risk situation comes with the usage of multiple cloud providers to maintain your data. This entails two or more totally separate hosts controlling your data in different regions which allows for tighter security when disruptions happen. Though this may sound a bit complex since you will have to deal with cloud hosting services managed differently and using their own systems, you need to look at the bigger picture on how multi-cloud usage could benefit your business. The additional costs involved by availing multiple cloud hosts could eventually be worth your money when you pay for maintenance repair during crashes or profits lost during downtime.
In fact, the demand for redundancy thru multiple cloud hosting providers has brought about the presence of several vendors that act as the go-between for customers who want to use multiple hosts but deal with just one company. These vendors tie up with different cloud hosting providers and offer their services to the customers who could use just one interface. The advantage of working with just a single company providing multiple cloud hosts is that data can be copied or transferred from one provider to another effortlessly. The mobility offered in this type of service has surely attracted many companies especially those producing and controlling data on a fast-paced business environment.
It is important however to note that companies must ensure that chosen cloud hosting providers for redundancy are protecting their data with a secured system. Data should remain confidential while being accessed only by authorized persons. In the process of releasing and using data thru the web, several security measures must be applied by these multiple cloud hosts in order for data to remain intact and unaltered. These risks are present once redundancy is made thru different cloud hosting providers but should be mitigated since they are entrusted by the companies to protect their data, systems, and ultimately their reputation.
Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.
About the Guest Author:
Rodolfo Lentejas, Jr. is a fulltime freelance writer based in Toronto. He is the founder of the PostSckrippt, a growing online writing business dedicated to producing top quality, original and fresh content. To know more about him, please visit www.postsckrippt.ca. Like him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.
July 19th, 2012
Recent investigations in online education reveal an encouraging trend about how cloud computing is positively influencing e-learning strategies by necessitating efficiency and expanding the reach of cloud-based education to students that are barred by distance and busy working schedules.
Cloud computing is employed in e-learning in the following ways:
The three kinds of cloud computing services highlighted above are meant to guarantee efficiency in all areas of e-learning operations. Hence, each institution that operates e-learning program adopts cloud computing to achieve their goals and purposes which include but are not limited to:
It is evident from the explanation given above that cloud computing offers increasing possibilities for institutions of learning to develop their e-learning programs in a way that efficiency will be guaranteed. The advantages of using a public cloud service are:
Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.
About the Guest Author:
Jerry Olasakinju, a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) degree holder, is a passionate researcher and writer whose interest in everything computing is unparalleled. He blogs about his literary works at http://jerryolasakinju.blogspot.jp/
July 18th, 2012
The concept of cloud computing is becoming more widely used by large enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses due to the reduced costs and increased efficiency cloud environments offer in a difficult economy. Although cloud computing is gradually becoming mainstream within organizations of all sizes, there still remains the concern over data security and encryption, especially in the public cloud. This concern is still an issue despite the fact that public cloud services have implemented several strategies for protecting data in the public cloud. There are a few basic methods which are commonly deployed in the public cloud to protect data; however, many enterprises are looking for specific management strategies for public cloud environments. The basic choices which are currently offered by public cloud service providers include providing encryption services to public cloud users which requires trust in the cloud service provider (CSP,) or enterprises can choose to trust their encryption to a third party service. The other option is to create an encryption management system on a server which is in-house. Trusting the encryption to a third party or tracing a management system back to an in-house data center takes away the flexibility advantages of using a public cloud environment. So what’s the answer?
Cloud Specific Technology
Using the public cloud environment especially with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) requires data security and encryption management that are cloud-specific. By using cloud-specific technology, the concerns related to data security and encryption is shifted to a system which is specifically designed for the cloud infrastructure as opposed to being applied on top of it.
One of the new cloud specific encryption technologies is known as homomorphic encryption, which provides cutting edge cryptography for improved data security in public cloud environments. This type of cloud specific encryption technology has not yet been released however, it is in the works and provides a way to reassure enterprises that sensitive data is never exposed when using a public cloud infrastructure.
Homomorphic encryption allows a computer to perform mathematics on data which is encrypted without having to review the data itself. At the moment, this technology is in the experimentation phase and cannot be implemented due to the massive resources which are required to perform this type of encryption. As experimentation progresses, homomorphic encryption will become of a viable option for enterprises seeking to manage the encryption of sensitive data.
Another type of cloud-specific data security technology that is under way is known as split-key encryption, which allows for encryption key management in the public cloud without having to sacrifice trust. And by adding partial homomorphic encryption it makes the split-key technology all that much more secure.
Split-key encryption technology works similar to the key system used for a safe depository in a bank. There are two keys, one of which is provided to the deposit box holder and the other which is held by the financial institution. The contents of the box can only be accessed using both keys.
Split key encryption technology is similar to the scenario provided above in that data is protected by two encryption keys. One key is kept with the public cloud service provider with the second key held by the user for each specific disk or data object. The encryption key which is kept by the cloud service provider utilizes partial homomorphic encryption. In other words, the key is left in its unencrypted form yet it is completely effective when used with split key encryption technology. This is because the virtual master key held by the public cloud service provider can perform math without any knowledge of the actual data. This allows the computer to perform calculations with the encryption key held by the enterprise.
Homomorphic encryption used in conjunction with split-key encryption technology is currently an advanced cloud-specific security strategy which provides enhanced data protection and security that makes it more resistant to hacker exploits. Each disk is encrypted with an individual key that is split into two parts.
The key that is held by the enterprise is not known to the cloud service provider. The encryption key held by the cloud service provider does not reside anywhere in the cloud yet it is effective when used in conjunction with the specific disk encryption key which is held by the enterprise. As the application accesses the stored data the CSP uses both parts of the key to encrypt and decrypt the data. Since the key held by the CSP contains partial homomorphic encryption the data is protected from intrusion or theft.
Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.
About the Guest Author:
Aeyne Schriber has more than two decades of accumulated experience in IT security, computer technology, and internet marketing, including technology education and administration field both on the public school and college level. She works worldwide helping companies establish an online presence from small businesses to large enterprises. Her skills as a published copywriter and marketer also include consulting and training corporate personnel and entrepreneurs. To find out more, visit www.digitalnewmediamarketing.com
July 17th, 2012
Many companies today choose to go with traditional backup and disaster recovery solutions, overlooking the fact that cloud computing and device virtualization have far more to offer. The many recent natural and man-made disasters in recent years – from the political turmoil in the middle east to the tragic tsunami that hit Japan – have had the effect of making businesses rethink their backup and disaster recovery strategies. However, studies indicate that many of the world’s largest corporations are still woefully behind when it comes to backup and disaster recovery; this is especially true of many financial services businesses in the United States.
United States financial institutions are particularly vulnerable to disasters and system downtime
The fact that data processing and acquisition is an essential aspect of financial services makes this lack of preparedness particularly worrying. Managing billions of contracts and tens of thousands of credit card transactions per second, the world’s largest banks rely on a strong network and computing infrastructure in order to carry out their business. This reliance on stable data centers will only increase due to the rise of online banking and the security risks that come with it.
Customers demand financial security from their transactions and a possible disaster could be critical to a financial institution’s operations. Therefore, the 2012 Disaster Recovery Index’ findings are worrying, indicating that only 35% of financial institutions in the United States are confident that their IT departments can execute effective disaster recovery operations and that only about 30% have confidence of a quick recovery from system downtime. These are not hypotheticals: nearly half of the surveyed financial service providers indicated that system downtime cost them more than a quarter of a million dollars every year!
With data recovery playing such a critical role in the financial sector, it is worrying that more companies are not making sure that they are protected from a possible disaster. Many IT managers have indicated that this problem comes from a combination of lack of resources and a lack of support from management. The complexity of these technologies can also be an issue. The unique combination of the need for the highest possible security for most of the data that is being handled, the need for speed, and the large-scale operations being carried out do not translate well in terms of infrastructure. This often stems from an incomplete adoption of new technologies and a lack of consolidation of existing infrastructure into optimized, manageable units.
The largest financial firms require a complex infrastructure that needs to integrate physical platforms with private and public clouds as well as physical and virtual devices. Establishing a backup and disaster recovery solution that encompasses all of a firm’s infrastructure is an expensive and complex matter. More than three quarters of the financial firms surveyed in the 2012 Disaster Recovery Index indicated that there is currently a lack of a comprehensive solution that integrates all of these platforms into a single, manageable, and affordable disaster recovery strategy. Confusion and costly management errors are increasingly commonplace in dealing with multiple vendors in an effort to manage multiple platforms. However, cloud computing advances in recent years indicate that a move to a strategy based mostly on cloud computing can help solve many of these problems and save money and effort in the long term.
Cloud computing and backup and disaster recovery strategies
Although cloud computing has an inherent advantage in ensuring that data is always accessible and more resilient against disasters, it is also important to backup virtual data. The cloud also offers backup solutions and more companies are starting to adopt a remote backup service for their most crucial data. In fact, data migration to the cloud can reduce IT operating costs significantly as well as helping backup and disaster recovery operations become easier to handle. It is important to understand that blindly adopting the latest cloud and device virtualization innovations may not always be the best option from a backup and data recovery standpoint. While the cloud itself offers greater advantages in these matters, it is the unwieldy combination of physical platforms and multiple virtual platforms that makes backup and data recovery significantly more difficult. Because of this, one of the mistakes that financial companies have made is simply adding new technologies to their existing strategy without the proper previous planning of infrastructure. To avoid the confusion and high costs that result from this, a careful strategy for IT infrastructure and implementation should be laid out in order to optimize the adoption of a new computing technology.
Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.
About the Guest Author:
Nida Rasheed is a freelance writer and owner of an outsourcing company, Nida often finds herself wanting to write about the subjects that are closest to her heart. She lives in Islamabad, Pakistan and can be found on Twitter @nidarasheed.
July 16th, 2012
For many years there was stability in the database segment of the IT industry. Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) such as Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL (to name a few) had proven themselves to be capable of handling vast amounts of data and that seemed to be all that modern businesses required. One of the leading solution providers in the ERP space said that it had 30,000 tables in its ERP database and that could handle the complexity of practically any business.
But the advent of Big Data changed the database scenario as nothing before it. Many IT professionals and business executives still do not comprehend the challenges and opportunities presented by Big Data and how the cloud is uniquely positioned to handle this. Understanding a few simple concepts and capabilities will help you extract the best from this emerging area.
What is Big Data
In computing parlance, Big Data is defined as datasets that are so large that they cannot be handled by conventional RDBMS. Handling this data which can be up to zettabytes in volume (1021 bytes) is a different task altogether. You can encounter data of these volumes if you are working in scientific fields, in weather forecasting and in pharmaceutical research etc. Any large city, with its thousands of security cameras all recording video footage could easily hit this kind of archival volume in fairly short periods of time. All large international retailers, relying extensively on RFID chips to manage the movement of inventory and an international supply chain also generate enormous quantities of data.
While all business analysts agree that there are gold mines of business information in this data, the challenge is to understand the trends and to be able to put them to business use. The capability to handle Big Data is required and only cloud based applications have the capability to handle such a task.
Turning to the Cloud to handle Big Data
One initiative that has proved extremely successful in handling enormous quantities of data is the open source cloud based Big Data management system known as Hadoop1. This was built from day one with the requirements of handling Big Data in mind. Hadoop combines both data processing capabilities and the physical cluster management capability to handle very large clusters of database servers and data. For example, in 2008, Yahoo! reported that it was using the world’s largest Hadoop application then which was working on a 10,000 core Linux cluster and handled all web queries.
Two years later, Facebook announced that they were running the largest cluster which was handling 21 PB of storage (1 PB = 1015 bytes), soon thereafter, this grew to 30 PB. This kind of storage and processing capability simply cannot be built in a conventional in-house IT center. You need the kind of capabilities that only the cloud can provide. In yet another example of Big Data management, the New York Times used 100 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances to process 4 TB of raw images into 11 million PDF files. The task took about 24 hours and cost – hold your breath – all of $240. This is the kind of capability that is possible with cloud computing1.
In yet another case of using the cloud to handle Big Data efficiently1, a cancer research team built a 50,000 core supercomputer to perform some core cancer research computations. This supercomputer was assembled in data centers spanning the globe. This virtual supercomputer ran for three hours and cost just $4,828 per hour to run. Such a supercomputing cluster can be set up by any qualified person in a matter of hours without any external help.
Maybe you are not yet into Big Data, but if you are passionate about growing your comp-any, it is only a matter of time before you will encounter Big Data with its many challenges and opportunities. It is important to understand that handling Big Data need not be a constraint and that you can take advantage of cloud computing techniques to get the best out of large data sets that your competitors may be afraid to make use of.
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About the Guest Author:
Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.
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