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er Years Decem
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And the cloud is huge! Even as cloud with applications accessible from Security and privacy – The number one
service providers won’t share their anywhere on the internet. Examples concern for would be cloud adopters. How
numbers, cloud space is estimated to be are web mail services such as Gmail, safe will your data be? However the best
1 Exabyte, which is more than a million blog posting systems, and pay per use/ cloud services vendors have state-of-art
terabytes and counting. That is a lot of subscription based software for storage, security systems, and they won’t want to
space indeed. accounting, and gaming. compromise and get into legal hot-water.
They can probably afford to put in better
Key characteristics of the cloud PaaS (platform as a service) is used by processes in place than the average small-
application developers to design and medium (or even, large) business.
• Access available from anywhere on the develop their own apps on a computing
internet regardless of device or location platform given by the cloud provider. Going offline – Your business is dependent
It›s a set of tools to enable coding and on the cloud system and the internet
• Cost reduction with scalability and fewer deployment of applications quickly. at all times. If the cloud’s down, so are
IT resources needed you. 99% uptime as promised by vendors
IaaS (infrastructure as a service) is the becomes critical, as sudden outages could
• Flexibility as infrastructure resources ‘rented infrastructure’ – the networks, be disastrous. Think holiday season, and
can be re-allocated quickly, scale capacity servers, operating systems, and storage your gifting business is hit by downtime
as needed that enable all of this. beyond your control.
• Multitenancy – shared resources across Why is the cloud great! Remember, compromised security,
users which means better load capacity, privacy, and downtime could even make
efficiency of use and lower costs Consider adoption numbers and benefits a business a target for lawsuits from
realized by businesses using cloud customers. It’s prudent to have disclaimers
• Efficient maintenance at a central computing services! and policies in place when operating
location – access to applications is in a cloud computing environment, for
possible from various locations These are findings are from a global situations beyond your control.
survey of 3,645 IT decision makers from
• Improved security as the provider has companies in eight countries. What’s next up there?
more focused and centralized resources,
even as there are concerns about loss of • 82% said they saved money on their last Despite all the trends and amazing
control over sensitive data cloud adoption project adoption numbers revealed – the cloud is
still under-hyped. In effect, we ain’t seen
A cloud service can be public, private, or • Cloud subscriptions of one year or more nothing yet!
hybrid in nature. In public cloud services, are taken by 65% of companies
the cloud vendor hosts the infrastructure Soon, the cloud will disrupt any domain,
that is shared across businesses, and is • 64% of subscribers reported lowered any industry, that’s exposed to it. It’s
for public use. Private cloud systems are energy consumption and wastage literally ‘raining’ change all over –
built specific to organizations, and cannot pricing models, selling strategy, business
be shared with other businesses. Hybrid • Increased data center efficiency and models, development, everything. There
cloud services are a combination of utilization by 52% of respondents while will be more efficient collaboration
private, public, and community systems 47% saw lower operating costs within organizations, and increased
to offer the benefits of each – privacy and competitiveness among them across
security, public access for an application • Access to services from any device was regions.
that stores sensitive data on the backend, the primary reason for cloud adoption for
and temporary extra capacity needs. one-third of these IT decision makers Cloud based services will complement
offline services such as transport by
Cloud computing service models But you should think about offering information and real-time
updates for travelers. In the near future,
SaaS (software as a service) is consumed Yes, it all sounds nice, but wait a minute leave your music and video at home
by end users as an on-demand service, now – here are some issues to consider. – they’ll follow you where you are,
transported by the cloud. Importantly,
with sophisticated ‘no-fail’ systems – fears
about security and downtime will fade.
There will be a wave of innovation, not
seen since the first wave of internet
adopters. 2014 – the year of the cloud, a
cliché? We’ve had a few such years already,
and some more to come!
December, 2014 SynergyZ 79
