How The Cloud Can Help Your Business Grow

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The use of technology is among one of the greatest challenges facing medium sized businesses. It also presents one of the biggest transformational opportunities to drive growth, promote innovation, reduce costs and ensure your business maintains a competitive edge.

1. Free up resources
Most businesses today are concerned about the state of the economy. Moving in-house hardware and software to a highly secure data centre means it can be delivered back as a fully managed service. This shifts focus away from worrying about whether IT is optimised to instead focusing valuable resources on innovation and business development.

2. Reduce risk and cost
Cloud adoption helps you to reduce costs on both IT investments and the business operating cost. Technology is ever-changing, and at a rapid rate. Keeping up-to-date with the latest advances is both expensive and distracting, while continually providing adequate training to staff adds additional costs. Leveraging outside expertise reduces risks and costs while providing peace of mind that you and your customers are protected around the clock.

3. Build in scale and agility
Opportunity may or may not be just around the corner, but when it does come,the need to enhance business capabilities can be pressing. Building applications on a cloud platform minimises the delay in deploying new IT–based capabilities. The right technology framework through the cloudmeans operational capacity can be expanded at short notice and at a cost that can beeasily managed.

4. Tap into new capabilities
Everyone

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Study Reveals The Cloud Does Save Businesses Money

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Despite the hype and claims by large software companies about the miracles of cloud computing, a combined study by Ireland’s National Software Engineering Research Centre (Lero) and NUI Galway has shown that cloud actually results in significant time savings for firms and drives down administrative costs.

The new report claims to offer the first empirical evidence globally of the benefits of cloud computing. Globally, the market for public cloud services is expected to increase by 19pc to US$109bn this year, according to Gartner.

Ed Anderson, Gartner’s cloud forecaster, predicts cloud computing is set to grow a further 100pc to be a US$207bn market by 2016.

“Despite the huge growth in cloud computing, research to date has largely been based on anecdotal evidence,” Dr Kieran Conboy at the Cairnes School of Business in NUI Galway, who is leading the SFI funded Lero research, explained.

“NUIG conducted an in-depth, evidence-based study across a number of Irish-based organisations to see if the perceived benefits stood up.”

Cloud-bursting

As well as supporting previous industry claims of cost and time benefits, the Lero research also found that cloud introduces a positive shift in the way companies interact with external sources, such as customers, and in the way employees communicate with each other. “This has the potential to leverage more innovation and collaboration along a company’s supply chain,” states the report.

A critical finding of the research was that all too often, organisations view adoption in overly simple terms – either they should

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Embedded Virtualization Can Secure Industrial Networks

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Security issues in industrial markets have been receiving much attention in the media. The vast majority of devices that power infrastructures offer aging technology in many cases and are not well prepared for the latest cyber security threats.

Taking the energy grid as an example: one does not have to be a scientist to find the holes when approximately 70% of the infrastructure is more than 30 years old.

Devices that were never designed for a connected world in the first place are wide open for attacks. Utility providers and the dominating players that power this market are under intense pressure; critical infrastructure is supposed to be stable, robust and often certified for functional safety requirements.

While safety systems are left untouched following certification for risk, complexity and cost reasons, a secure system is only secure if it is able to withstand the latest vulnerabilities. The contradiction between the lifecycle of safety and security is a very expensive challenge today. However, the good news is that embedded virtualization can alleviate these security challenges.

To provide a solution that can be retrofitted to an existing infrastructure, new security devices are often integrated with existing devices. Firewalls, IPS, IDS or other boxes add to the CAPEX cost, but also increase the complexity of the supply chain management for installations that have may have a lifecycle of 25 years or more.

New systems are designed with both safety and security in mind. Functions that would be in separate

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Five Cloud Computing Myths

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The cloud seems to be a prickly, double edged sword at the moment. Well, that’s if Steve Wozniak’s predictions of doom are to be believed. His belief that the cloud will bring “a lot of horrible problems in the next five years” seems to be at odds with the view of enterprises whose rapid adoption of cloud computing is reflected in Gartner’s predictions of a 48% increase in cloud services this year alone.  While this polarisation of opinions is nothing new in the world of IT and often goes hand in hand with game changing technological innovation, the hype and confusion seem particularly frenzied where cloud is concerned.

Whilst the promise of cloud computing to reduce costs, manage expansion and make the creation of new services easier is very real, we’re still in the early days of adoption. Organisations are still largely digesting what they’ve heard, sifting through the benefits, and weighing up the fears concerning its impact.

Matthew Finnie, CTO of Interoute believes that the despite the hype and misinformation the cloud offers real benefits for business. Below, he puts to bed some of the common myths and misunderstandings around the cloud:

  1. Myth 1 – Cloud computing isn’t right for everyone
    How can this be true when 50% of all businesses already have some level of server virtualisation, and they already know it works? The fear felt by those that don’t think it is for them actually comes from equating
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Predicting Performance Anomalies In Cloud Systems

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Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new software tool to prevent performance disruptions in cloud computing systems by automatically identifying and responding to potential anomalies before they can develop into problems. Cloud computing enables users to create multiple “virtual machines” that operate independently, even though they are all operating on one large computing platform. However, this approach can cause performance issues when a software bug, or other problem, in one virtual machine disrupts the entire cloud.

Now researchers have designed software that looks at the amount of memory being used, network traffic, CPU usage and other system-level data in a cloud computing infrastructure to develop a definition of the wide range of behaviors that can be considered “normal.” CPU usage is the amount of computing power being used at any given time. The program defines normal behavior for every virtual machine in the cloud, and can then look for deviations and predict anomalies that could affect the system’s ability to provide service to users.

One advantage of this approach is that it does not require users to provide so-called “training data” about what constitutes abnormal behavior, which is important because training data are often difficult to obtain in production cloud systems. Moreover, this approach is also able to predict anomalies that have never been seen before.

If the program spots a virtual machine that is deviating from its normal behavior, it runs a “black box” diagnostic that can determine which

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Is The Cloud A Utility?

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The benefits of removing the capital investment and the day to day management of hardware and software to leverage an on-demand, metered computing service, charged on a consumption basis, are now widely accepted. The rise in cloud computing is indicative of our need to make the most efficient use of resources and minimise costs by accessing computing resources and infrastructure when, and as, it is needed.

This business model has drawn many comparisons between the cloud and what we think of as more traditional, public ‘utility services’ such as gas, electricity and water. Yet, to what extent are these comparisons valid? Are we at the stage where cloud services can be accessed and delivered in the same way as any other utility service; where we can activate the service quickly and easily, switch the service on and off, and easily move between different providers?

While comparisons seem reasonable, I’d argue that we do need to exercise some caution when it comes to making these associations between the services. There are distinct differences not only in the way these services are delivered, but also the way in which they are regulated and governed. To this end, we should define what we all understand as utilities; typically these are mature industries, there’s a level of consistency in delivery, they must operate to certain standards and they are independently regulated. They are also characterised by the ‘commodity’ nature of the service – we don’t

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5 Hidden Costs of Cloud Migration

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Cloud computing promises a low cost of entry and fast return on investment, but that ROI can fall short of expectations if hidden costs are left out of the equation.

A new white paper from global IT association ISACA, “Calculating Cloud ROI: From the Customer Perspective,” takes a close look at the true costs of cloud migration and offers a practical framework for calculating returns on migrating to the cloud.

The free white paper outlines five hidden costs that enterprises may fail to anticipate when moving quickly to cloud-based services:

1. Cost of bringing services back in-house due to regulatory change (e.g. stricter data privacy laws)
2. Cost of implementing and operating countermeasures to mitigate risk
3. Unexpected expenses involved in initial migration of systems
4. Loss of internal IT knowledge providing competitive differentiation
5. Lock-in with specific cloud provider or proprietary service model, which may slow down future adoption of open standards-based services

“Cloud computing represents significant changes to the delivery of traditional IT services, and its advantages have been well documented for a number of years. However, any movement to a new IT delivery model should identify the proposed benefits and the cost to achieve these over its entire life cycle,” said Vaughan Harrison, President of the ISACA Wellington Chapter and Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers New Zealand.

“Organisations should consider the impact of moving to a cloud environment by identifying potential movements in its current strengths and weaknesses, the ability to achieve

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Hidden Benefits Of Cloud Computing

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There are many benefits of cloud computing that don’t necessarily make the headlines or the 30-point bold bullet in the PowerPoint slide, but they are still important when considering using a cloud service.

It’s pretty apparent to anyone in the technology world that cloud computing is an established and accepted approach to the delivery of computer software and infrastructure as a service. From music and movie streaming services such as Netflix and Pandora, to personal storage offerings such as iCloud and SkyDrive, to business software platforms such as Force.com, Azure, and Amazon Cloud, the cloud concept has permeated everywhere into our computing lives. There are even a series of Cloud Computing for Dummies books available, as perhaps the greatest testament to its mainstream acceptance. And as network bandwidth reliability and availability continues to improve throughout the world, cloud computing will only continue to grow and expand.

As the cloud computing concept emerged and was beginning to take hold, many notable benefits were presented and touted by cloud proponents to, what was, a skeptical audience at the time. The primary benefits that were identified are widely accepted as truth today: reduction in fixed software, hardware, and infrastructure costs; ease of accessibility from multiple locations and devices; built-in upgrade paths that are relatively seamless to end users; and flexibility and scalability of the platform as user counts grow. These advantages had significant impacts to the decision makers who were considering cloud services and have

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Hype Cycle For Cloud Computing, 2012

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Enterprises are beginning to change their buying behaviors based on the deployment speed, economics and customization that cloud-based technologies provide. Gartner cautions however that enterprises are far from abandoning their on-premise models and applications entirely for the cloud.

Based on an analysis of the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2012, the best results are being attained by enterprises that focus on a very specific strategy and look to cloud-based technologies to accelerate their performance. Leading with a strategic framework of goals and objectives increases the probability of cloud-based platform success. Those enterprises that look to cloud platforms only for cost reduction miss out on their full potential.

Cloudwashing and Inflated Enterprise Expectations

While the hype surrounding cloud computing may have peaked, cloudwashing continues to cause confusion and inflated expectations with enterprise buyers. This just slows down sales cycles, when more straightforward selling could lead to more pilots, sales and a potentially larger market. Cloud vendors who have the expertise gained from delivering cloud platforms on time, under budget, with customer references showing results are starting to overtake those that using cloudwashing as part of their selling strategies.

Additional take-aways from the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing include the following:

  • The Cloud BPM (bpmPaaS) market is slated to grow 25% year over year, and 40% of companies doing BPM are already using BPM in the cloud. Gartner has identified more than 30 bpmPaaS applications and platforms, and defines this category as a
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The Intelligent Network At The Heart Of Cloud Computing

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The emergence of new media (such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and even the virtual world of Second Life) is spelling new challenges for businesses. They have widened the scope for consumers to air their fury against any product imperfections or service inefficiencies they experience. They have in fact become a potent weapon like no other as the damage is instantaneous and global.

Companies have to deal with them with a sense of urgency, as FedEx discovered recently. A video of a FedEx courier throwing a monitor over the fence of a customer location went viral on YouTube. FedEx reacted immediately with an apology, explaining that it went against its values.

Significantly, FedEx started circulating among its staff the video that brought it disrepute as a learning tool to improve service and win customer trust. Other actions were also initiated as the company sought to convey the message that the incident should not be taken as being representative of its 290,000 professionals worldwide. The customer who triggered it all and made FedEx react with a sense of urgency was satisfied with the response.

Consumers waste no time in blogging/tweeting about their experiences with the products they use or the services they get. Such is the power of social networking that the damage from any misadventure, perceived or real, is instantaneous.

On the brighter side, with the right social media strategies, as this FedEx example demonstrates, enterprises can turn even negative publicity to positive

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