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Cloud computing in construction industry: Benefits

Posted on 23/04/202016/06/2021 by Tushar

The cloud is already widely adopted within the construction industry; however, for companies that are still considering it and for those whose use is limited, here, we look at seven important benefits it provides.

1. Cost savings

Every penny matters in the construction industry, so the cloud’s ability to help companies work more efficiently and effectively is one of its chief attractions. Savings come in multiple forms. From an IT perspective, the move to the cloud and to a vendor’s infrastructure reduces the company’s need to run in-house datacentres that require expensive cap-ex investment in hardware and the ongoing datacentre costs. The scalability of the cloud, together with its pay-as-you-go charging model provides further opportunities for efficient usage.

Additional savings also come from using the cloud to monitor operations. Combining data analytics with artificial intelligence yields insights into business processes that invariably throw up more efficient ways to run businesses and thus reduce costs without affecting quality.

2. Access information from anywhere at anytime

In the cloud, all your data is stored centrally and is available online, regardless of where your teams are or what time. This makes it incredibly easy for employees to collaborate and access the most up-to-date, synchronised files.

This is highly beneficial for construction companies as the very nature of their projects means they are working on sites away from the office. It also makes it much easier for employees working on large sites or projects with multiple sites to get hold of the information they need.

3. More competitive bidding

While cost savings help improve the bottom line, they also help construction companies to be more competitive when bidding for new projects. By using cloud-based business intelligence, they will have a more detailed prediction of the project’s costs, a better understanding of component availability and can give a more accurate indication of other influential factors, such as the environmental impact of their work or how energy efficient the completed project will be. All these can help make the bid more attractive to potential customers.

4. Manage growth better

Opportunities are everywhere in the construction industry, but the nature of the sector means companies need to be clear about those which are right for their business. Today, when researching new market segments or territories, organisations are increasingly making use of cloud-based analytics to evaluate a wide range of internal and external indicators that give them a clearer picture of the challenges and advantages of these potential expansions.

5. Building Information Modelling (BIM)

Today, the construction industry is making far greater use of Building Information Modelling – a process that results in the development of a centrally stored project model that can be accessed, shared and updated by all parties. Based in the cloud, the BIM enables the company to collaborate with all stakeholders, including planners, designers, suppliers, those from other disciplines and other construction companies taking part in the project. By clarifying the exact project for everyone, this removes uncertainty and thus helps overcome budget, timescale and supply challenges while reducing the potential for conflict between the different parties.

6. Improve employee safety

Construction sites and the materials and machines used can be inherently hazardous and this makes employee safety one of the chief concerns of any company. Increasingly, organisations are looking at how cloud-based solutions can help minimise risk even further. Using the cloud enables companies to simplify and centralise the reporting of incidents over the internet, share data with collaborators and suppliers and then analyse that data to provide safety insights and develop new safety procedures and equipment more speedily for use on sites.

When predictive tools are used, this can then help companies better understand the safety risks of each new project, enabling them to put improved measures into place during the planning stage rather than as a reaction to an incident that happens once construction work has begun. It also helps factor safety into the price and timescale of the project.

7. More effective communications

The number of people involved in a construction project can be vast and includes not just the company but the customer, architects and planners, suppliers, sub-contractors and other construction companies. Keeping everyone in the loop and up to speed is vital to keep the project on schedule and budget, and to ensure that issues are dealt with swiftly and effectively.

Cloud-based communication systems make this far easier and quicker to do and ensure that communications can be accessed and traced more effectively. What’s more, rather than having to send copies of files in email attachments that can quickly go out of date, attaching links to files stored centrally in the cloud means information accessed will always be synchronised and up to date.

Conclusion

Construction companies have a lot to gain from using the cloud and there are many ways in which it can benefit. The biggest advantage, however, for those who have yet to adopt, is that doing so will put you on par with the majority that have already begun to make the leap as part of their digital transformation.

Cloud Computing Technology : Advantages for Schools

Posted on 19/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

Cloud adoption is not just something for big business. Today, schools across the globe are adopting it for the numerous benefits it brings, including for staff, students and parents. Here, we’ll look at the ways cloud technology is transforming education and bringing schools into the 21^st Century.

1. Cut costs

With staff costs swallowing around 80% of school budgets and changes to school funding having an impact, business managers are hard pushed to make ends meet. Over recent years, school savings that have taken decades to accrue have dwindled. At the same time, schools are increasingly having to modernise their IT infrastructure in order to keep pace with technological developments and keep their curricula up to date. This often requires the purchase of expensive servers, as well as paying for the additional IT expertise to manage them and the ongoing energy costs to keep them running and cool.

Moving to the cloud technology eliminates the need to buy on-site servers completely, replacing them with a vendor-hosted infrastructure that is paid for with a more manageable monthly cost. And with no hardware to manage and maintain at school the burden on IT staff is reduced, freeing them up to work on more important, school-related tasks. In addition, with no 24/7 air-conditioning and power to pay for, further cost reductions can be made.

The hardware savings and reduction in other costs is even bigger for multi-academy trusts, as they will only need a single cloud package to cover all of their schools. This trust-wide system can then be controlled by a single team at the trust’s HQ, rather than needing staff in each school.

2. Everywhere accessibility

One of the biggest practical advantages of moving to the cloud technology is that it enables data and information to be accessed anywhere with an internet connection. This means teachers and pupils can access files, documents and other learning resources anywhere – something that has been absolutely critical during the pandemic. They can also collaborate and communicate far easier using a wide range of devices, communication channels and specially developed education platforms.

With highly secure logical access control in place, schools can restrict access to information so that only those given permission can have access. This can be done on an individual basis so that each person is given the right access to the information they need. With logical access in place and school data and files stored centrally online, the possibilities for extending learning beyond the classroom and enabling staff to collaborate are endless.

3. Better parents’ evenings

The cloud opens the door to a new way to hold parents’ evenings. Over the last year, we have seen many schools using the cloud to replace face to face parents’ evenings with video calls – something that both parents and staff have found favourable. Parents are happy because they can book appointments to suit online and don’t need to travel to the school, struggle for a parking space or wait endlessly in a queue while appointments drag on over the allocated times. Online, they last exactly as long as the school sets them, usually five minutes.

Online parents’ evenings are also good for the school. They reduce the burden on staff as no one has to timetable the appointments and send hundreds of print outs, the school doesn’t need a super-clean and furniture rearrangement, and there’s no need to provide refreshments or pay someone to serve them. Teachers, meanwhile, can hold their appointments from home instead of having to stay late and wait for hours before the event actually begins. Online, they’ll also have access to the data they need for the meetings and can even share it on screen. Additionally, the school doesn’t need to be heated or lit and the caretaker doesn’t need to be paid overtime. There are also benefits to the wider community as local roads won’t be blocked by traffic, residents won’t find their parking spots filled and there’ll be less pollution.

4. Real-time data – on tap

The use of data has become vital for schools in helping them drive everything from whole-school initiatives to improving the progress of individual students. Increasingly, school leaders, classroom teachers, pupils and parents need to access that data and want it up to date. This is incredibly difficult to achieve when that data is not held centrally. If individual teachers or departments store their most recent data on local machines or even portable drives, what’s available to everyone might be out of date and won’t give the current picture.

The cloud can transform the way data is stored, managed and accessed. Held centrally, everyone can access the data they are permitted to access and be assured that it’s the most up-to-date version available. What’s more, data held centrally doesn’t get lost when people accidentally delete it from a machine or lose their portable drive. It also means data can be backed up online quickly and securely, instead of IT staff having to make daily backups to other drives or disks in school.

5. Cut the costs of print and paper (financially and environmentally)

Schools spend a fortune on paper and printing, much of which, today, is unnecessary. Instead of handing out numerous worksheets for students to complete classwork and homework with pen and pencils, they can be completed and marked online. This also ensures there’s a permanent copy of them which doesn’t go missing and reduces the amount of old schoolwork taking up valuable storage space in stockrooms across the building.

The same goes for the copious amount of literature that schools send home: letters to parents, newsletters, consent forms, pupil guides, uniform regulations and so forth. All of these can be made available online and parents can be sent text messages or emails with a link to download them. What’s more, making them available online means parents can go back and relook at them at a later date which is hard to do if paper and email versions have been put in the trash.

Of course, the financial benefits are boosted by the environmental ones. The CO2 generated by manufacturing and transporting paper and printing out messages are vastly reduced. That’s not to say that sending electronic communications is carbon-free, it isn’t, but the environmental impact is significantly less.

6. Personalised environments

Personalisation is one of the major benefits of cloud technology and has been seized upon by businesses to improve the customer experience. Just think of how your Amazon homepage is personalised for you when you log in. This is something that the cloud also enables you to achieve as a school.

Its main benefit is for students. Here children can have personalised learning environments created for them, helping schools address accessibility issues for individual students and providing all pupils with schoolwork that is customised for their individual needs. It’s a highly effective way to provide all students with individual learning plans that can be easily managed and implemented. This, indeed, is a far more beneficial project for your IT team to work on than managing an on-site server.

It’s not just pupils that benefit either. Teachers can have personalised areas of their school portal making it easier to access the data, files and information they need, helping them do their jobs more effectively, instead of having to sift through a portal designed for everyone’s use. The same applies to parents. Overall, it improves everyone’s experience of accessing the school online.

Conclusion

Schools can no longer ignore the digital transformation that is taking the world by storm. Digital products and services are benefitting users in all aspects of life and staff, students and parents expect to be able to make use of these technologies in the school environment. From a school’s perspective, adopting cloud technology is essential to make use of these digital services and benefit from the advantages they bring.

Emerging trends in Cloud Computing

Posted on 10/05/201910/06/2021 by Tushar

Barriers to enterprise adoption of cloud computing including security concerns and regulatory compliance continue to crumble. As new cloud computing capabilities mature, such as support for containers and serverless computing, multi-cloud environments are becoming the platform of choice for innovation and digital transformation.

Cloud computing, a fundamental component of the digital trends affecting businesses today, will continue to grow in 2019, driven by these key trends:

Edge computing is on the rise

The proliferation of IoT devices and the need for organizations to deliver near real-time services based on advanced data analytics is pushing the action out to the network edge. The explosion of data at multiple edge locations has profound implications for data management, hybrid cloud models and digital technologies such as machine learning and AI. Sending data collected at the edge back to a single public cloud or to an enterprise data center for processing is ineffective because companies need to be able to make fast decisions as close to the data sources as possible in order to minimize analytics latency.

Multi-cloud management becomes an imperative

In an edge computing world, companies must embrace a multi-cloud strategy in which compute power and analytics capabilities exist in multiple locations but are managed seamlessly across the enterprise landscape so there is no interruption in producing the business results the company needs. Functions such as security, governance and auditing need to run across all platforms, but there are other operations that are better managed within individual clouds, so companies need to sort that out and draw clear lines.

Data management gains new importance

As data becomes increasingly distributed due to the requirements of edge computing, data management across multiple clouds becomes critical. Companies need to understand where the data is located, who has access to it, and how it needs to be processed throughout the data lifecycle.

Regulatory compliance impacts infrastructure

The full ramifications of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) will be felt in 2019 and are expected to have a significant impact on how companies handle and secure data that falls under regulatory scrutiny. This affects edge and cloud data and requires companies to re-think their data management and data control systems. However, the barriers to running highly regulated applications in the cloud are evaporating and many companies are finding they can meet even these tighter compliance and security standards in a multi-cloud environment.

Data centers continue declines

As more and more workloads move to the cloud — even crown-jewel, mission-critical applications such ERP software — the pressure builds to close enterprise data centers altogether. There will always be some workloads that have to run in an on-premises environment. But companies can move those workloads to a co-location facility that features high-speed, low-latency connections to the cloud to maximize data integration, so companies can still shutter their data center without impacting the business.

Modern operating platform adoption grows

Organizations that simply lifted and shifted existing applications to the cloud are now taking advantage of maturing approaches like serverless computing and containerization to re-factor their applications for a cloud-native environment. While there is still some apprehension as organizations try to figure out the best way to benefit from these new approaches, companies will see a real payoff in application optimization on these new platforms in 2019.

DevOps and security merge

Increasingly, security best practices will be codified into the application development tooling pipeline. In a DevSecOps scenario, security is baked into the agile development process via automated systems. On the operations side, companies will benefit from the improved monitoring and increased visibility provided by cloud service companies. In fact, it is difficult to argue today that a small or mid-size company has better security than cloud providers who have made security a top priority. And third-party cloud-based providers will use machine learning to offer security services like threat detection-as-a-service.

High-performance computing moves to the cloud

There have always been some specialized, high-performance applications that organizations were reluctant to run in the cloud. But cloud providers have built high-performance, GPU-based systems that are now allowing organizations to migrate niche, high-performance applications, thus making it easier to shutter their data centers.

Cloud computing was once associated with shadow IT or with apps that could be opportunistically migrated, but in 2019 we will see multi-cloud environments emerging as strategic platforms for driving innovation.

8 Reasons Why Cloud Hosting Helps Businesses Compete

Posted on 23/03/201922/06/2021 by Tushar

Organisations are flocking to cloud computing in greater numbers than ever before and many are expanding their use of it. This comes as no surprise, given the many advantages that cloud migration brings. In this post, we’ll look at how the cloud hosting enables its users to outperform their competitors.

1. Cloud users save money

One of the primary reasons that organisations migrate to the cloud is to cut costs. By using the hardware and services of your cloud provider you’ll no longer need to spend enormous sums on purchasing your own hardware. And that’s just the start of your savings. As you won’t need a data centre any longer, you can eliminate the expenses of running one. The money spent on maintenance, management, space, security, air-conditioning, power, insurance, etc. can all be put to better purposes.

2. Instant scalability

Being competitive means being able to adapt at speed to market demands. One of the drawbacks for businesses running their own data centre is that scaling up can be a slow and expensive process. If you are getting increased traffic to your website and you need additional resources to cope, scaling up can involve purchasing a new server, setting it up and getting it online. This can take quite some time to do. When you use the cloud hosting, your service provider’s vast data centres mean that you can have all the resources you need instantly.

Another issue faced by organisations scaling up in-house is that the additional resources they acquire aren’t fully utilised. For example, your company may get high traffic for certain periods but for the rest of the time, the new server sits idle. This doesn’t make it the wisest investment. Cloud services, however, are charged on a pay as you go basis. You only pay for what you use, so during quieter times, the costs are minimised.

3. Speedy application deployment

It’s not just scaling up that can be done quickly in the cloud hosting , the deployment of the critical applications needed to give you the edge in a competitive market can also be done instantaneously. This can be particularly advantageous for smaller enterprises as it gives them the same speed of deployment as larger competitors who have superior in-house capacities.

Cloud-based apps require far less time for successful execution, most of them being available immediately on signup, giving you instant access to game-changing technologies such as AI and machine learning.

4. 100% uptime

Today’s organisations rely on critical applications to run their operations. The disruption caused by downtime is a major issue, as events such as server failures can cause operations to grind to a halt. Fixing the problem can be difficult and time-consuming and the resulting losses and reputational damage can be substantial.

In a cloud environment, server failure cannot cause downtime. As clients are hosting on virtual machines, when a physical server error occurs, the virtual machine is simply moved to another part of the server cluster. This hyper-converged infrastructure protects organisations against everything from hard disk issues to entire server failures, guaranteeing 100% uptime for critical applications.

5. Latest technologies, exceptional performance

Another problem with in-house data centres is that the technology organisations purchase or lease soon become less competitive than the newer, high-performance products that are regularly released onto the market. Continually updating is both expensive and disruptive and this often puts companies at a disadvantage.

For cloud service providers, investment in these new technologies is a necessity in order for them to remain competitive and meet the growing expectations of their clients. The advantage for cloud users is that they will see their applications running on the latest, high-performance servers without the need to invest in the technology themselves. These are servers where performance is consistently optimised, using powerful processors, blisteringly fast SSD drives and load balancing to maximise speed and capacity utilisation.

6. Increased security

Every organisation has concerns about security, so it’s good to know that cloud providers are obliged to comply with stringent security regulations to safeguard customer data. Your provider will protect you against hacking, malware and internal data theft. Using state of the art firewalls that feature intrusion prevention and in-flow virus protection, threats will be detected and isolated long before they reach your server. Other security features include data encryption, remote backups and VPN.

7. Organisational transformation from working online

As a cloud user, your employees can access your system from anywhere with an internet connection and this has helped many organisations to reap the benefits of remote working. It enables companies to employ highly skilled members, no matter where they live, and bring about more flexible working hours. It also means they can save on the amount of office space needed as staff can collaborate in real-time using online conferencing and through the sharing of synchronised files.

Furthermore, as employees can access the company’s system using connected devices such as smartphones and laptops, many companies have dispensed with these costs by introducing a ‘bring your own device (BYOD)’ policy that uses authentication to maintain security.

8. Do more with technology

Perhaps the biggest benefit of the cloud is that it is a technology that enables you to do more with other technologies. With Big Data analysis, machine learning and AI all rapidly deployable, just imagine what potential cloud brings: personalised marketing and communications, improved customer services, discovering new development opportunities and much more. Cloud is also the ideal place for companies wanting to take advantage of the Internet of Things, augmented reality and the other ground-breaking innovations that are helping to reshape the way the world works.

Conclusion

Cloud hosting enables even the smallest of companies to take advantage of the technologies that are transforming today’s marketplace and working environments. In doing so, it makes them far more competitive, while enabling them to spend less and do more. At the same time, these organisations can also benefit from the cloud’s high-performance and reliability, its scalability and flexibility and its highly secure environment.

Cloud Computing : 6 Most Common Applications

Posted on 20/03/201922/06/2021 by Tushar

Cloud computing has become very popular for businesses. As of 2018, over three-quarters of enterprises were already using it and more are adopting it every day. If you haven’t considered it yet, that’s possibly because you’re not sure what you can use it for. To give you an idea, here we’ll show you the six main ways it is being put to good use.

1. Big Data analytics

Today’s businesses collect vast amounts of data on all manner of things: customers, operational processes, logistics, machinery health, product condition and much more. The value of that data comes from making sense of it, using it to come up with solutions to problems or discovering new opportunities. To do this, however, you’ll need to conduct Big Data analytics and this requires the use of substantial computing resources, often over short periods.

Those resources would be incredibly expensive if you had to purchase them and for much of the time would stand unused. Convincing the finance director this was the wisest use of the company’s money would be a difficult challenge. The advantage of cloud computing is that its pay-as-you-go pricing means you can access all those resources for the times you do need them but not pay for them when you don’t. This way you can carry out Big Data analytics whenever you need but do so affordably.

2. File storage

While it’s true that you can store your files in many places, what makes the cloud so appealing is that files can be accessed, edited and shared anywhere with an internet connection and this opens up a variety of opportunities for mobile working, collaboration and even improved security.

What’s more, the cloud provides high-speed, high-availability access as well as offering scalability to increase or decrease storage as demand requires – again paid for on a per-use basis.

3. Testing and development

Developing a new application or platform in-house can be an expensive and long-winded process. It involves significant spending, time and staff involvement and requires the procurement, installation and configuration of hardware. This means it takes longer to complete a project and can put your company at a disadvantage with competitors.

Cloud computing can make testing and development quicker, less expensive and less complicated. This is because there are various pre-existing and perfectly suitable cloud environments already built and ready to use out of the box.

4. Disaster recovery

Lots of companies use the cloud as the solution for their disaster recovery needs. Continuous backups of your servers in the cloud mean that you’ll no longer need to pay for a separate, redundant DR site of your own. Not only is recovery much cheaper, it’s also far quicker, ensuring your business is back online in no time at all.

5. Data backups

Traditional methods of backing up data have tended to be complicated and time-consuming, often requiring portable drives or even tapes being shipped to remote sites for storage. This is also a technique that can back-fire if the drives are too small for the data or are discovered to be defective.

Cloud-based backup is far easier to carry out and more secure. You can schedule backups to meet your needs; store them remotely on virtual servers, knowing that if the physical hardware hits a problem the data is still available; they can be encrypted for increased security and checked to make sure the data is not corrupt. And as with all cloud storage, you can have as much space as you need without fear of running out.

6. The Internet of Things

The internet of Things is beginning to transform the way we live our lives and increasing numbers of enterprises are making use of it. An IoT system works by collecting data from large numbers of connected sensors and uses this to make intelligent decisions – often using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

To take advantage of the IoT, the cloud is needed to analyse that data and make insights from it. A smart traffic system, for example, can monitor traffic conditions across an entire area, discovering where issues arise and using AI to quickly reroute or slow down vehicles in order to prevent a hold up. This kind of intervention would be almost impossible to gather without the capabilities of cloud.

Cloud’s scalability is also important for IoT. As a company grows, so might the number of IoT devices it sends and receives information from. More devices mean it will need larger computing resources and this can be achieved quickly and easily in the cloud without the need for significant capital investment.

Conclusion

Cloud enables businesses to do many things that, without it, they would find more expensive, overly time-consuming or beyond their in-house IT capabilities. From basic solutions, like storing files and backing up data, to highly sophisticated processes, such as Big Data analytics and IoT data processing, the potential of the cloud is enormous. Indeed, what we have discussed here barely scratches the surface and there are even more developments yet to come.

Cloud Computing Advancing, According to New Statistics

Posted on 11/03/201922/06/2021 by Tushar

The annual round-up of statistics about cloud computing has now been published by the major research companies and these have provided a wealth of valuable insights into how the cloud landscape is changing. In this post, we’ve chosen some of the more relevant statistics which highlight the areas where cloud computing is developing and where companies are spending their IT budgets. Hopefully, you’ll find these informative.

1. Vast majority of companies using cloud

The latest statistics figures from the 451 Research Group show that 90% of companies are now using cloud computing for some of their services. Indeed, the number of workloads running on cloud-hosted servers rose from 48% in 2018 to 60% in 2019. According to Cisco, this will rise to over 90% within the next two years.

2. UK is a major investor in the cloud

The UK is the world’s third-biggest investor in cloud computing, with companies spending £7.6 billion in 2019. This is just short of the £8 billion invested in China. Both countries, however, are well behind first placed US, which spent almost £100 billion on cloud computing last year.

3. Private vs public cloud

Though more expensive, the average company runs more workloads, 41%, in the private cloud compared to 38% in the public cloud. There is, however, a disparity between how larger businesses and SMEs use these forms of computing. Bigger organisations carry out 46% of workloads in the private cloud and 33% in the public cloud whereas SMEs do almost the opposite: 43% in public cloud and 35% in private. The fact that the spending on public cloud is increasing three times faster than that of private cloud indicates that more small and mid-sized companies are migrating and opting for the public solution when they do.

4. Popular cloud services on the rise

According to tech media giant, IDG, almost 90% of companies use Software as a Service (SaaS) which enables them to access and make use of software, such as Microsoft 365, over the internet. Cisco predicts that, by 2021, SaaS will handle three-quarters of all cloud workloads.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) has also become very popular with over 80% of companies now using it to provide them with resources, such as servers, virtualisation, data storage and networking, that they need to run apps and carry out workloads.

5. Clear reasons for cloud migration

The cloud’s ability to give access to data from anywhere with a connection is the driving force behind over 40% of cloud migrations. The opportunities it provides for collaboration, global networking, BYOD environments and flexible, work-from-home working conditions, together with all the benefits these bring, has made this the primary reason for cloud adoption.

Other major factors to have influenced companies’ decisions include using the cloud for disaster recovery and for reducing the burden on IT staff so that they can concentrate on more business-oriented tasks.

6. Cloud more secure than in-house data centres

According to Gartner, this year will see workloads carried out in public cloud, IaaS environments experience 60% fewer security events than in-house data centres. The main reason for this is that the expense and complexities of maintaining secure in-house systems is difficult for most businesses to achieve. Public cloud providers, on the other hand, have the resources and the income to develop first-class security that uses a multi-faceted approach. As this security comes as part of the cloud service, customers who opt for IaaS can often forgo the issues of developing their own, in-house solution.

While there are still risks when using the cloud, Garner believes that within 2 years over 95% of problems will be caused by customers. Problems resulting from employee errors will be much reduced due to the increasing use of automation.

7. Main uses of cloud

Analysis of companies’ cloud spend gives a clear indication about how companies are using it. Currently, large businesses spend a quarter of their IT budgets on cloud services compared to a fifth for SMEs. The biggest spend goes on remote, online backups and disaster recovery solutions, which account for 15% of all cloud expenditure. Web and email hosting, together with online productivity, each account for around 10% of overall spend. 2019 saw companies that had already adopted cloud increase their spending by a quarter. Much of this was to help them better manage the increasing number of workloads they were migrating to the cloud.

Conclusion

As these statistics show, cloud computing is now an integral part of almost every company’s IT strategy. With IaaS helping to drive down IT costs and increase security, SaaS opening the doors to access-anywhere data and flexible working conditions and the ability of the cloud to help with disaster recovery, it is not surprising that 90% of businesses now use it. And these figures don’t even take into consideration the cloud’s ability to provide companies with artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analysis and all the other powerful technologies available.

The 5 ways cloud computing will change in 2020

Posted on 06/03/201922/06/2021 by Tushar

Cloud computing is set to continue its remarkable development this year with technologies like 5G, Kubernetes, AI and machine learning increasing the scope and scale of the operational uses it can be put to. In this post, we’ll look at these technologies and see how they will change the face of cloud computing and how businesses use it.

1. IoT boosted by 5G

The long wait for 5G is finally over and, with its introduction, we’re set to see it play a critical role in the connectivity of IoT devices, extending that connectivity way beyond the limitations of wi-fi and enabling the development of edge computing.

The exponential growth in the number of IoT devices is coupled with an equally gargantuan collection of data. As the value of that data for delivering rich insights prevents enterprises from deleting it, companies are left to find a way to store and process it all. They need massive data storage capacity and vast compute capabilities. At the same time, some of the new technologies being developed for IoT use, self-driving vehicles being a prime example, require network latency to be almost eradicated.

5G can help with all these issues. It can connect devices where wi-fi and cabled connections are not available and at exceptional speed, it enables storage and compute services to be installed at the edge of 5G networks, shrinking latency to less than a millisecond while reducing the type and volume of data being stored in datacentres.

2. More stringent security standards for public cloud

Security is a critical concern for all enterprises and one new area to consider is the issue around 5G as it becomes part of the cloud network. The UK’s decision to use Huawei technology for its 5G network has already become a political hot potato. This, together with other concerns, is likely to lead to more stringent security standards, particularly over endpoint security, for cloud providers.

It is expected that tighter regulations will be introduced for the architecture of hybrid clouds requiring full data separation between on-site and public cloud environments. Brexit will also play a part, as the UK goes its own way in implementing standards regarding data protection.

3. More users adopting hybrid cloud

While many companies have considered hybrid cloud computing , its technological challenges have led to most of them adopting a purely public cloud model. And while there are workloads which are better suited to a hybrid solution, the lack of flexibility to deploy both on-site and cloud infrastructures is a hurdle which many enterprises are not equipped to overcome.

In 2020 and beyond, we’ll start to see new tools that can overcome these management and migration challenges. These tools will split migration into two separate processes where companies can first become familiar with their new programming and management models on-site before finally moving their infrastructure to the cloud. This is particularly helpful for those organisations that want to move to the cloud but don’t want to abandon the investments they have made in their datacentres and hardware.

4. Kubernetes to become the standard container

Containers have become widely used by companies that need to run multi-cloud workloads. By providing a platform-agnostic solution for the packaging and management of applications, they have simplified the process of cloud adoption and migration.

Of all the container solutions available, Kubernetes has become the most widely adopted. The primary reason for this is that, aside from housing an application, it also specifies the app’s required infrastructure, including load balancing, networking and scaling. What’s more, the standardised way in which it does this means those specifications can be more easily transferred across providers. When it comes to deploying infrastructure for container-based workloads, Kubernetes is today’s go-to solution. Additionally, its popularity means there are also a growing number of tools being developed to support its use.

5. AI and machine learning used in networking

AI and machine learning are now being deployed to carry out a wide range of operations and this means companies are reorganising their IT services to enable them to make deployment easier. One area where AI is beginning to bring developments is in networking, helping with such things as reducing energy consumption and in automating maintenance tasks. Expect to see even more examples of its uses coming into the spotlight in the next few years.

Conclusion

It is an exciting time for the cloud with technologies like 5G, containers, AI and machine learning enabling its users to undertake more operations and enhance their capabilities. However, with expanding uses comes an even greater need for security and higher standards in how data is used. Hopefully, the information given here will have shown you what developments are in store and how your company can benefit from them.

Ways cloud hosting is similar to Santa

Posted on 21/01/201918/06/2021 by Tushar

You might think it Christmas crackers to believe a beardy, old sleigh driver donning a red hat, has anything remotely in common with an internet-based hosting solution â€“ but youâ€™d be wrong. Both of them, in their own unique ways, can bring us many benefits. So, as Christmas approaches and we begin to let our minds wander away from work and towards the festivities, hereâ€™s a more seasonal and humorous post for you to enjoy. Here are the reasons why cloud hosting is like Santa Claus.

When it comes to running critical operations, Santa relies on his sleigh just as much as businesses need their applications. Downtime for either can be disastrous. Sleigh failure can result in millions of unhappy children waking up to empty stockings – an unimaginable reputational disaster for the worldâ€™s most trusted brand. For others, the standstill caused by server failure not only damages reputations but can also result in significant losses.

Neither Santa nor businesses like downtime

While Santa relies on magic reindeer dust to keep his sleigh in action, for businesses, the best option is to migrate to cloud hosting where the possibility of downtime due to server failure is non-existent. The virtual nature of a cloud environment means that it delivers consistent performance with guaranteed 100% uptime. This is because its hyper-converged design protects against everything from hard disk failure to an entire server failure, enabling critical apps to be always available.

Reindeer fast performance

Speed is essential for both Santa and modern businesses. For Santa, dropping off presents to the worldâ€™s 2 billion children in a single night means he has to work fast. Itâ€™s been scientifically calculated that he needs to travel at approximately 650 miles per second to get everything done in time and to achieve this, he needs more than your average reindeer. Indeed, the average reindeer can only manage 15mph and most of those would be flagging after half an hour of pulling all that weight.

What makes everything possible for Santa is that he uses the cloud. Rather than taking the sleigh over rugged terra firma, riding high in the cloud provides an almost friction less environment to travel and where gravity has less of an impact. This massively improves his speed.

That same cloud, or one very similar to it, can also help boost the speed of your data. Indeed, as data is weightless, it can travel even faster through the cloud than reindeer, almost at the speed of light. And with high-performance servers featuring powerful Intel Xeon CPUs and super-fast SSD drives you can perform critical tasks quicker than an elf can say â€˜Merry Christmasâ€™.

Santa has been so impressed with cloud technology, heâ€™s now adopted load balancing to prevent his sleigh tipping over on tight corners. For cloud hosting users, load balancing maximises speed and capacity utilisation so that when servers are busy, the load is distributed. This ensures that no server suffers from performance problems and, with multiple data centres at their disposal, cloud providers can always ensure optimised performance.

Both Santa and cloud hosting save you money

Whether you are buying presents for your children or cloud hosting for your business, it is important that what you buy offers you value for money. Whatâ€™s great about the cloud is that you can save on the costs of running a data centre and the capital expenditure needed to pay for hardware. Everything you need is provided by the host. There will be no need to pay for premises, electricity, physical security, maintenance or insurance.

Similarly, with Santa, those who have well-behaved children can save on the cost of buying presents. Instead of spending a fortune on Amazon, simply get your â€˜nice listâ€™ kids to write a letter to Santa and put it in the nearest post box. Doing this automates the process of putting presents in stockings and under the tree on Christmas Eve. Although a small delivery fee of a mince pie and a shot of something warming is required, the savings are dramatic, especially when your child has an eye for expensive electronic gadgetry.

Unfortunately. If you have naughty kids, youâ€™ll have to supply your own presents or make do with the small bag of coal that â€˜bad listâ€™ children get left.

Both come with expert little helpers

When you have significant workloads, it pays to have experts on hand to help you get things done. Santa, for example, has an army of elves who spend their days creating the presents, wrapping them up and loading them onto the sleigh. Theyâ€™ll also manage the naughty and nice list and organise the presents in a way that enables delivery to be done with awe-inspiring efficiency.

If Santa has a technical problem, Mrs Clause offers 24/7 support, together with tea and biscuits, to help him find an effective solution. Last year, for example,Rudolphâ€™s nose was a bit dim and Mrs Clause provided the right type of carrot to add to Rudolphâ€™s food â€˜til the luminous glow was restored.

Users of cloud hosting also benefit from expert little helpers. Working away behind the scenes is an army of engineers and technicians who ensure that your hosting is expertly managed. Theyâ€™ll monitor and maintain the servers, update the software, scan for intruders and malware,and generally make sure your hosting is working as effectively as possible.

At the same time, should you have any issues, a good cloud host will provide their own 24/7technical support. While they may not know one end of a reindeer from the other, they will have expert skills in helping you with all your hosting needs and will be available by phone, live chat or ticket.

Wrapping up

So, as you can see, it is possible to compare Santa with cloud hosting. Comparing,however, doesnâ€™t mean you have to choose between them. If youâ€™re clever and have been good all year, you can have both. Now, that is good tidings.

On your journey to the cloud, choosing the proper implementation partner.

Posted on 19/01/201918/06/2021 by Tushar

When you are planning a move to the cloud, choosing the right partner is critical. Even though it can be difficult to know exactly what to look for, there are things you can do in your search for an implementation partner that can help you make informed decisions and mitigate risks along the way.

Learn to spot a re-badged reseller

With the systemic shift to move IT infrastructure and applications to the cloud, there has been a dramatic increase in the demand for IT consulting services. This cloud economy has precipitated a situation where many vendors and resellers are re-inventing themselves as service providers rather than simply as technology sellers.

Organizations are setting themselves up as cloud service providers despite lacking the necessary qualifications to do so. These re-badged resellers will have a number of flaws including limited experience within the team, limited knowledge about specific industries and solutions and a lack of service-oriented culture. These flaws can put the companies that choose to work with these new services organizations at risk.

They have neither the knowledge nor the experience to deliver specialized, high-value services to customers. They may hire some experienced staff but, without a strong strategic direction set by management and reinforced by an entrenched services culture, they are unlikely to be able to deliver the business transformation organizations seek.

Meet with the people who are actually doing the work

Organizations should beware of partners that introduce high-level consultants to the customer but get junior staff or offshore teams to execute the work. It is important to meet and speak with the team that is actually doing the work. The clarity and effectiveness of communications can suffer enormously when the team doing the work is not the same as the team speaking to the customer.

Come up with a list of demands

As an organization looking to move to the cloud – you may have a lot of questions and having a partner with the focus and experience deep enough to provide a high level of service is critical.

It is important to come up with a list of demands in your search for an implementation partner:

A mix of specific technology knowledge and business knowledge so the team can clearly understand the organization’s business imperatives and deliver cloud solutions accordingly
A strong physical presence and footprint in the industry with positive customer references, preferably from long-term customers in the same industry as your organization
A stable, well-qualified team with significant tenure at the organization, proving that the organization is a genuine player in the marketplace rather than a rebadged product reseller
Proven project control and governance methodologies that can be clearly explained
The ability to bring senior vendor representatives into any discussion to drive results

Ask questions

Organizations should ask the following questions to determine whether a potential partner is capable of delivering a successful cloud service:

What is your customer retention rate and how do you measure it?
Where will our data reside and what access controls are in place?
Is there a dedicated project manager for this implementation and what are his/her qualifications?
How will you ensure we have control of the system?
How will your team work with ours to ensure project success?

Once these questions are satisfactorily answered, the organization can move to the next stage of assessing whether the partner is suitable.

When it comes to defining a path to cloud, organizations should focus on providing increased business efficiencies, increasing user satisfaction and meeting business expectations, as well as addressing the risks identified. With the right partner in place, organizations can achieve enormous benefits and mitigate those risks.

Why Is The Cloud the Best Option for Customer Data Management?

Posted on 14/01/201918/06/2021 by Tushar

The more a company understands its customers, the better it will be able to build relationships, enhance the customer experience and deliver accurate, personalised marketing. Today, the tool of choice for providing these insights is a customer data platform (CDP). In this post, we’ll look at the benefits of using CDPs and why, to get the most value from them, they need to be deployed in the cloud.

What is a CDP?

A CDP is a database application that organises and unifies data into a consistent record that can be used by all the company’s systems. In doing so, it provides a comprehensive, all-touchpoint overview of customers, either as individuals or as members of various groups, which is invaluable for the analytics needed to inform decision making. The results offer companies credible, real-time data on their customer’s behaviour which can be used to help personalise marketing, improve customer experience and thus strengthen relationships.

Businesses collect data from a wide range of sources, these include IoT devices, website and mobile app behaviour tracking, purchase histories, emails, live chat interactions and information provided by the customer about their personal circumstances, such as age, gender, occupation, family, income and so forth. Often, much of this information is gathered and stored separately, with access to it limited to individual departments. When data is stored in these silos, no-one in the company has the full picture and this can have a negative impact on any decision making.

The benefit of a CDP is that it can take data from all these sources and unify them, giving all decision-makers the complete perspective they need to develop successful strategies. It allows them to pool personal information with behavioural, attitudinal and engagement data to understand the needs of the individual and discover patterns in customer groups. It can even help discover new groups that hadn’t previously been conceived.

The insights provided by analysing unified data enable the company to develop models that predict how customers’ attitudes and behaviours react to different stimuli, for example, how their shopping habits change at birthdays, how their investments may change if they have children, or how they respond during crises like coronavirus. Having this data enables companies to pre-empt changes in the market, helping them to best meet customers’ changing needs and do so faster than their competitors.

More than this, analysis also provides essential feedback on the decisions which have been made and the strategies which have been implemented, indicating where monies can be saved and where improvements can be made.

The importance of cloud

While using a CDP brings obvious benefits, there are challenges to deploying it effectively. With so much data being collected and analysed today, businesses need increasingly larger data storage and processing capacity. Providing this in-house can be expensive, with companies needing to purchase the necessary high-spec hardware and applications, employ IT staff to manage the system and pay for ongoing overheads like maintenance and power. As more data is collected, additional hardware will be required, all of which will need to be replaced when it becomes obsolete.

A cloud solution eradicates any requirement to purchase hardware and can lessen the cost of software licencing. All the infrastructure required is provided on a pay-as-you-go basis and is managed, maintained and updated by the vendor. This means that when additional resources are needed to undertake large scale analytics, you only pay for them when you use them, making it the most cost-efficient way to undertake the process.

A cloud solution also makes it easier for your IT team to focus on more business-oriented projects as the vendor will provide a managed service, as well as offering 24/7 expert, technical support to help your team deploy and run your system and applications.

Once your cloud-based CPD is deployed, it will then be available over the internet, meaning team members who need access to it can do so from anywhere they have an internet connection. This improves collaboration and allows teams to work remotely, anywhere in the world.

Another factor to consider is that, for many businesses, the internet is the source of most of their customer data, such as from websites, apps, emails, live chat and IoT devices. As most of these touchpoints are cloud-based, it makes sense that the data they gather remains in the cloud as it can be stored in the same data warehouse and thus be better managed and more swiftly processed.

Finally, but also of crucial importance, is that the cloud provides exceptional data security. Data can be backed up continuously, with backups being checked for integrity and being encrypted, ensuring the data is not only secure but can be restored almost instantly should there be a data loss. Access to data can be restricted using logical access while logins can be protected using single sign-on or multifactor authentication protocols. The vendor also provides a wide range of security measures, including firewalls, malware monitoring, intrusion prevention and so forth. All these measures can help ensure companies comply with data protection regulations like GDPR.

Conclusion

A customer data platform provides one of the most useful tools for companies undergoing digital transformation, enabling them to have previously unattainable insights into their customers and the marketplace. To make the best use of this, a company will need significant data storage and processing capacity. Cloud offers the most cost-effective way to provide the infrastructure needed, while also providing scalability, security and IT expertise. For more information about our cloud services, visit https://anteelo.com/.

1. Cost savings

2. Access information from anywhere at anytime

3. More competitive bidding

4. Manage growth better

5. Building Information Modelling (BIM)

6. Improve employee safety

7. More effective communications

Conclusion

1. Cut costs

2. Everywhere accessibility

3. Better parents’ evenings

4. Real-time data – on tap

5. Cut the costs of print and paper (financially and environmentally)

6. Personalised environments

Conclusion

Edge computing is on the rise

Multi-cloud management becomes an imperative

Data management gains new importance

Regulatory compliance impacts infrastructure

Data centers continue declines

Modern operating platform adoption grows

DevOps and security merge

High-performance computing moves to the cloud

1. Cloud users save money

2. Instant scalability

3. Speedy application deployment

4. 100% uptime

5. Latest technologies, exceptional performance

6. Increased security

7. Organisational transformation from working online

8. Do more with technology

Conclusion

1. Big Data analytics

2. File storage

3. Testing and development

4. Disaster recovery

5. Data backups

6. The Internet of Things

Conclusion

1. Vast majority of companies using cloud

2. UK is a major investor in the cloud

3. Private vs public cloud

4. Popular cloud services on the rise

5. Clear reasons for cloud migration

6. Cloud more secure than in-house data centres

7. Main uses of cloud

Conclusion

1. IoT boosted by 5G

2. More stringent security standards for public cloud

3. More users adopting hybrid cloud

4. Kubernetes to become the standard container

5. AI and machine learning used in networking

Conclusion

Neither Santa nor businesses like downtime

Reindeer fast performance

Both Santa and cloud hosting save you money

Both come with expert little helpers

Wrapping up

Learn to spot a re-badged reseller

Meet with the people who are actually doing the work

Come up with a list of demands

Ask questions

What is a CDP?

The importance of cloud

Conclusion

Delivering excellence, collaborating across time zones.

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Atlanta

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Take a look at our global hideouts.