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Google

Cloud War: Will Google Overtake AWS?

Cloud war is heating up, as the top player vie with each other to garner more market share and revenue in an ever-growing market environment. As more individuals and companies take to the cloud to make the most of what it has to offer, the top four players, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, IBM and Google are competing with each other to offer the best services at the lowest possible rates.

The very idea of this cloud war is to ensure that one company stays on top of others when it comes to market share and revenue. Currently, AWS is the king as its revenue and market share is way more than that of Microsoft, IBM and Google. But that doesn’t mean that the others can catch up.

In fact, Google is going all out to beat AWS, IBM and Microsoft to get to the top in this cloud war. After Diane Greene took over as the head of this divisions, Google has made rapid strides in this regard. It has introduced many new products, slashed its prices heavily and has even entered into lucrative partnerships with organizations around the world – all in a bid to increase its market reach.

The latest effort in this regard is the prominent role that Google wants to play in the entertainment industry. Tariq Shaukat, a president in Google’s cloud division is one of the keynote speakers at the National Association of Broadcasters show that is happening in Las Vegas. This platform is expected to give Google and its parent company, Alphabet, a wide audience in the media and entertainment industry.

Shaukat is expected to talk about the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and how it can provide the media and entertainment industry with all that it wants to increase their revenue and make their operations more efficient. He is also expected to help this industry make the most of what one of the top tech companies in the world has to offer.

One of the products that Google plans to showcase is Zync, that can enable bandwidth-intensive projects to be rendered at high speeds. Anything ranging from virtual reality to animated TV shows can be hosted on this product, and this is precisely why Google thinks the entertainment industry platform is a good place to talk about it.

These efforts are towards a larger goal, which is to become the top cloud provider soon. In an interview to Forbes, Greene has said that there is a good chance for Google to become the number one cloud provider in five years because it is taking all out effort to make the most of every platform and opportunity.

In March of 2016, Google already announced that it was going to pour in billions of dollars into its cloud business as that’s going to be one of the key revenue drivers in the future. This also explains why it’s planning to increase the number of data centers from three to 15, by the end of 2017.

Will Google surpass AWS in five years and emerge as the winner in this cloud war? Possibilities are there, but time will tell.

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News

Huawei’s New Global Cloud Idea

Huawei, a Chinese multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Shenzhen has decided to build a cloud, but a little differently than others. It will be based on its cut of OpenStack, but the difference is it will have a patchwork of clouds that will run by itself.

Sounds confusing? Well, yes. After the announcement was made a couple weeks ago by its CEO Eric Xu, it got many reporters and the cloud community wondering on what this could be and what exactly does Huawei plan to implement.

After many questions and clarifications and reports by many journalists, it’s clear that Huawei will create a cloud platform and will take the help of its partners to build public clouds that’ll run on this platform.

Surprisingly, Huawei has already started the process of implementing this idea. It has already entered into partnerships with companies such as Deutsche Telecom, Telefonica and Orange and they are expected to build their public cloud offerings on this platform. Besides, Huawei has its own public cloud too that it runs in China. It’s not clear if this cloud service that it offers in China will be a part of its platform.

On the software side too, Huawei has made some progress. It has built a cut of OpenStack called “FusionSphere” and another software called “FusionStage”, which is an enterprise platform-as-a-service that is built on Kunernetes and Docker. Though these products are not complete and ready for public deployment, they’re almost there. This is also partly why Huawei has started offering it to customers who may want it.

At this point, it is targeting telecom companies, especially those in the developing countries. Huawei wants to target the countries where it has a wide presence and then move on to other markets. In fact, it is offering good kits at affordable rates, so these tools are accessible to anyone in any part of the world.

Though this company has spelled out a road map for its products and for its emergence as a key cloud player, there are some aspects that are still hazy. Will Huawei run its own public cloud? Will it back local cloud providers, and if so, what’s the criteria for that? There are many such unanswered questions, but what’s clear is that all Huawei-powered clouds have unified APIs that will allow their customers to migrate their operations to the cloud.

This can bring up the question of what’s different. Well, the significant difference is that Huawei plans to reach out to countries that the top players such as AWS, Microsoft and Google will not touch for years. This is great news for these countries as well as the cloud industry as a whole because it simply means that more countries and businesses will get to enjoy the benefits of cloud. This way, global companies will also get to work with local companies since they have cloud as the common link that can bring their businesses together.

Overall, this strategy from Huawei will work well for itself as well for other small companies in developing countries, provided it is implemented  the way it was conceived.

 

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Sin categoría

The Government of India’s New Mandate on Cloud Storage

India is one of the hottest growing economies in the world today, and its cloud storage industry is thriving as well. Almost every major cloud provider has a presence in India due to its robust economy and a burgeoning middle class.

In the light of such a scenario, the mandates released by the government of India is important to understand for all service providers and the companies that depend on it for their storage and computing needs.

One of the most important mandate was that all government data should be stored only within the territorial region of India, but other private and public data can be stored across one or more discrete sites in foreign countries. This mandate is in tune with what other countries have been doing and in many ways, it’s also a sensible move.

The current political environment of India and its relationship with surrounding countries also have a bearing in this decisions. For example, India and its neighbor Pakistan have been in a state of pseudo-war for the last six decades and there have been instances of terrorist attacks and infiltration bids that have made it necessary for India to protect itself.

On the other hand, it has been having a territorial dispute with China for the last few decades and recently, the visit of Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader to the disputed areas have increased tensions with China. In a nutshell, India is surrounded by issues from both its neighbors and this is becoming a cause of worry.

When government data is stored outside its borders, there’s always a possibility for it to fall in the hands of other countries, who can use it to their advantage. To prevent that from happening, the government of India has released this mandate.

Currently, many government departments rely on cloud service providers for a variety of services. This includes both foreign and homegrown companies. There are eleven companies that provide cloud services and they are Microsoft, Hewlett Packard (HP), IBM India, Tata Communication Services (TCS), Sify Technologies, CrtlS Data Centers, Barat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and Net Magic IT Services.

These companies handle some of the most complex and high traffic sites in the world such as the Indian Railways, tax submissions, form filings and more. Such high volumes of traffic Surprisingly, top names such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud are missing from this list of companies that service the government departments.

In many ways, these details released by the government throws light on many aspects. Firstly, there’s still a ton of opportunities as cloud adoption is still only in the nascent stages at the government level. Many of the state governments and local corporations have not embraced the benefits of cloud computing. Secondly, this means there’s opportunity for both big and small players in this sphere to have a bigger role in providing services. Thirdly, all this augurs well for the Indian economy as a whole.

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Computing

IBM Delivers Mixed Results

On April 18, IBM released the first quarter results of 2017 and its not a happy picture. The overall revenue declined by 2.8 percent and this is the 20th straight quarter that has seen year-over-year revenue declines for the company.

IBM reported a total revenue of $18.16 billion this quarter and this is 2.8 percent less than the revenue of $18.68 billion it generated during the same period in 2016. It also feel short of analysts’ expectations as they were looking for a revenue of around $18.39 billion.

The net income for this period was $1.75 billion and this is way short when compared to$2.01 billion it reported a year ago. Also, the GAAP earnings per share is $1.86 compared to $2.09 last year. Due to these results, the stock price of IBM fell by five percent during the after-hours trade.

Though these results looks bleak and dismal, they’re actually not. Over the last few years, IBM has been making strategic changes for its businesses. In fact, it’s the newer initiatives like analytics, cloud computing and artificial intelligence that have generated positive results for the company. These new initiatives represent $7.8 billion of the company’s total revenue and this has registered a 12 percent increase when compared to the first quarter of last year.

In fact, cloud can be the real savior for IBM here. The company a revenue of $3.5 billion in this quarter and this is a 33 percent increase year-over-year. This goes to show that there is a lot of change happening in terms of IBM’s operations and it’s its past businesses that are slowing it down.

In many ways, this result shows some important trends that are happening in this industry now. There is a clear shift towards cloud technologies and any company that doesn’t want to ride this trend is sure to be left behind.

Also, this reflects that there is a growing demand for technologies like cloud and cognitive computing, and this reflects the changing nature of the IT industry as a whole. Gone are the days when we were focusing on software products. Today, we want to have everything as a service that can be used on a demand basis.

For example, when we wanted to use a tool like Adobe photoshop, we had to buy a CD and install it in our system a decade ago. Today, you can simply pay a subscription, go online, use the tool and save your files on the cloud. This goes to show how much we have evolved as a society and how well we have adapted to these changes.

Going forward, IBM should focus more on these emerging technologies as they are likely to be the revenue drivers and generators over the next decade.

In short, IBM’s results was a mixed bag as the ghosts of its past businesses are pulling it down, but the newer business areas are doing exemplarily well. This simply reflects the changing nature of business and how IBM is adapting to this change.

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Microsoft

Microsoft Buys Deis

Microsoft wants to expand its cloud computing presence and it believes the best way is to bring in more cloud computing developers into its fold. To this end, it has acquired a cloud container specialist called Deis from a cloud orchestration company called Engine Yard. The financial details have not been disclosed.

Deis is a technology that works well with cloud containers. If you’ve never heard this term before, container means independently deployable code that accomplish a specific task. Each of these containers are discrete and require little to no interaction with other container components. The entire logic for a single functionality is contained within it.

This container is the fundamental building block of virtualization environments. In addition, a container knows how much of processing power it needs and the calls it has to make through the respective Application Programming Interface (API).

These containers are the most essential for an agile cloud-based development environment as they can be quickly deployed when compared to monolithic architecture. Also, microservices architecture that is based on these containers, is catching up in a big way because of the need to have short deployment circles on the cloud and also to overcome the many disadvantages that come with monolithic architecture.

Handling these container components is the cornerstone of Deis’ operations. It provides three open-source tools for managing all kinds of Kubernetes deployments. These three container services are:

  • Workflow – this is the technology that allows developers and organizations to deploy and manage container components.
  • Helm – this is a Kubernetes manager that handles different components
  • Steward – this is a Kubernetes-native broker that enables communication between different containers, on a need basis.

Since Deis specializes in creating such components, it makes sense for Microsoft to bring it under its fold before other companies get to it. Also, such a container-based environment can work well for Azure too, and this is one of the main reasons for Microsoft to make this move. With this acquisition, Microsoft hopes to catch up with AWS in terms of cloud market share.

Also, Microsoft believes this acquisition can give it a lead over other players such as Google and IBM that are fast catching up. Through this move, Microsoft has also filled a gap in cloud skills development and this can give it an edge over other players in the long run, provided other companies continue in the same state of operations.

From Deis perspective, this is the best thing that can happen to it. In general, small companies expect to get acquired by one of the larger players, so being acquired by Microsoft is in many ways an honor for Deis and its parent company Engine Yard.

So what does this acquisition mean for the cloud market as a whole? Well, not much really.

AWS is so widespread and pervasive that it doesn’t see these developments as a threat to its competition and existence. For the others, it’s simply more food to the party.

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Computing

Cloud tools for Business Tasks

When it comes to running a businesses, it’s the small things that take up a ton of your time and effort. On another side, we’ve heard so much about the cloud and the benefits it offers in the form of saving time, money and effort, not to mention the reduced hassles of managing technology. Can we combine these two to use cloud tools for everyday tasks?

Yes.

Let’s look at a few tasks that we can do with cloud tools.

Appointments

One of the most painful tasks is to get an appointment with someone. This pain multiplies with the number of appointments you have to make for your business.

Let’s say, you want to get a sales appointment with the executives of a handful of companies to showcase your products to them. Imagine how much time you’ll spend to get an appointment with each of them. Cloud can ease this task for you.

ScheduleOnce, Appointy, TimeTrade, Calendly and SetMore are examples of such cloud tools that get appointments and manage them for you in a jiffy. They even integrate this with your calendar, so you can always stay on top of your appointments.

Customer Service

There is a staggering amount of cloud tools available in the area of customer service. Part of the reason for this proliferation is the fact that customer service is an integral part of every business, and also a time-consuming one.

In addition, every call and interaction you make with customers have to be tracked for analytics as well. This can require much effort, and one way to take some load off your shoulders, is to use a cloud-based CRM service. There are different tools with extensive customization options, so you can choose the one that best fits your business needs.

Hiring

Reports show that many companies prefer to hire freelancers to save on overheads. For this, you can make the most of cloud solutions like Upwork and Fiverr as they gave you access to freelancers worldwide.

There are cloud tools that can also ease the process of selecting and hiring full-time employees. These tools help you to connect with the right candidates to reach the best fit among thousands of people who’re looking for work. In this sense, cloud tools can be a blessing when it comes to hiring full-time employees and freelancer.

Payroll processing

Another complex task of any business is payroll processing. Paying your employees and freelancers, keeping track of the hours they worked and paying them is anything but simple. In addition, you have to manage meticulous records for the purposes of taxation and analytics, and this can take a substantial amount of your available resources.

To help you perform such a complex task, there are many cloud tools like QuickBooks, Payroll Mate and Payroll by Wave. Each of these tools can automate the entire payroll process, save records for tax and can even run analytics for you to give you an idea of how much your spend.

We hope this list helps to save some time and effort for you. Do let us know if you know more such tools.

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Services

City Harvest – A Case Study

Cloud is pervasive and is used across all sectors to do a ton of things. It’s no longer about corporates using it to gain business value and intelligence, rather it’s become an integral part of our everyday life. In fact, many small businesses and charity organizations are leveraging the power of cloud to improve their performance, efficiency and operations.

New York food charity called City Harvest specializes in collecting excess food from farms, grocers, restaurants and manufacturers and gives them free to more than 500 soup kitchens, community pantries and other community-based kitchens in New York.

One of the important aspects here is that City Harvest doesn’t move manufactured or cooked food., which means, it has to collect the raw ingredients like fruits and vegetables and deliver them quickly to community kitchens. During all this, it has to track the full chain custody of the food that is collected and delivered.

This charity has a fleet of 22 trucks and two tractor-trailers that make about 20 stops each day to collect and deliver food. Such a complex system requires high levels of operational accuracy and planning, and this is why it has turned to the cloud for help.

What it’s done is to have mobile apps that are used by drivers and the agencies to which it delivers. This gives it the ability to communicate in real-time. For example, when a driver makes a stop at a location, he or she can know what is available for pick-up. Once he posts it on the app, community kitchens can decide right away what they need and the same will be delivered to that kitchen within the shortest possible time.

The obvious advantage with such a system is that the food is collected and delivered fresh, so healthy meals can be served by these kitchens. Secondly, there is little to no waste and every kitchen gets to pick what they want from the available items. This way, City Harvest acts as a perfect bridge between the givers and users, and in the process ensures that no food is wasted.

Since all this data is stored in the cloud, there’s no more paper work involved. According to James Safonov, the IT head at City Harvest, it used to take the charity almost five days to reconcile paper work. With cloud, the same reconciliation is done in minutes, thereby saving the staff a huge amount of time and effort.

This additional time and effort is being spent in innovation and improving the efficiency of operations and getting more suppliers to their list.

For agencies and suppliers, this app helps them to see where their food is getting delivered. They can even get an understanding of the allocations made among community kitchens in real-time. This information can help them also to plan better.

For the users of community kitchens, this app is a blessing, Called Plentiful, this app helps them to register for food assistance and see what’s available in pantries and food kitchens. As a result, their wait time is reduced significantly and also eases administrative tasks for food providers and community kitchens.

Overall, a great example of how you can leverage the power of cloud.

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Sin categoría

What self-driving cars have to do with the Cloud?

The next big thing in the world of technology is Internet of Things (IoT). This is a technology that enables the smooth flow of data and communication across ordinary devices like your alarm clocks, refrigerators, cars and more. In fact, self-driving cars are becoming a reality sooner than we think is possible, and much of this has to do with advancements made in cloud and IoT.

So, what’s the connection between cloud and IoT?

Simply put, cloud infrastructure is the base technology that’s driving IoT including self-driving cars. All devices that want to communicate with each other need a common place to store and access data, and this is what cloud infrastructure provides. Regardless of the nature of the device and the function it performs, it can access and store data in the cloud.

This easy accessibility to data is what makes communication possible in the first place. For example, let’s say, your refrigerator has to monitor the level of available milk, and if it goes below a threshold, it has to automatically order it for you by communication with the app on your smartphone. In addition, this data has to be stored for analysis, so you know how often you’re buying milk and how much you’re spending on it.

All this communication and data exchange happens through the cloud infrastructure. Likewise, your wearable and self-driving cars also need cloud infrastructure to communicate across devices.

For now, we’ve established that cloud infrastructure is essential for self-driving cars and IoT in general. The next question is how we can extract value from it.

This depends on the way a company plans to monetize its infrastructure. Let’s take another example here. We have self-driving cars that are connected to a smartphone. As you drive through a shop, you get a notification that a list of items in that shop are on sale. You may want to stop and check it out or even buy from it. When this sale happens, the car company will get a commission on the sale value.

With such a strategy, the car company is able to get more value for its infrastructure than merely just stopping after a sale is done. In this sense, cloud is likely to create a continuous stream of revenue for the company. The above example is just one way of monetizing the cloud. If you think through and look closely, the options are endless as your cars can act as a central place of communication for the many activities you do.

In fact, these benefits are not just limited to the car manufacturer alone. The economic benefits can flow across different organizations operating across different sectors. In the above case, the economic benefits will accrue to the store, its suppliers and more. Overall, it can change the way we think and buy different commodities, and over time, the economic benefits will add up.

However, the underlying driver of this change is cloud infrastructure and this is why it is essential for self-driving cars.

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Computing

How to identify malicious content on the cloud?

Malicious content and code is unfortunately everywhere in the digital world. For every piece of genuine content, there are at least double the number of false or illegal content. Though there are many privacy and anti-spam laws, they are not as useful as they are expected to be.

This puts the onus right back on users like us. We have to learn to navigate the digital world by identifying malicious content from the genuine ones.

This becomes all the more imperative for companies that host their data and applications in the cloud, as they have much to lose from malware content. Though cloud offers a ton of benefits like increased productivity and reduce operational overheads, it has also opened up more chances for hackers and malware specialists to insert unwanted code into our applications.

In fact, this problem is more pervasive than what most people think. A study by Georgia Institute of Technology showed that 10 percent of cloud storage repositories were hacked in one way or another. Surprisingly, many of these cloud repositories act as distribution centers for malicious content, without the awareness of the owners.

This study is an important revelation as it helps businesses to understand the threat landscape in which they operate. Secondly, it can help companies to come up with appropriate solutions that’ll help to prevent these attacks or negate them, in the worst case. This way, the organization can prevent such malicious activities from impacting their organization, and more importantly, can curb their repositories from being the distribution centers.

The next big question is how can you identify good content from malicious one?

The same study compared two sets of data – a good set and a bad set, using which they were able to identify the features of a bad set. One of the first things they noticed is the presence of redirection. If a piece of code or data evaded discovery by a scanner or if it was used as proxy, then there’s a high possibility for such content to be spam. This is simple because any good content can be accessed legitimately.

Another big differentiator is the lifetime of the content. In general, malicious content had a short lifespan when compared to genuine content because it takes only a certain amount of time for the malicious content to get distributed across systems. Also, if the same content is present for a longer time, there’s a chance for it to be found out. So, malicious content have only a small lifespan as opposed to genuine content, which can remain in the cloud for many years.

So, what can client organizations do to prevent this malicious code? The answer depends on a host of factors. Firstly, organizations should talk with cloud providers to come up with basic protection mechanism on the infrastructure side to reduce the chances for malicious code to enter into the network. Organizations should also take similar steps to ensure that their network is not compromised either.

Alongside, organizations have to come up with some strategies to control access to unauthorized repositories, constant monitoring of assets and other strategies that it deems essential.

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Computing

Accenture is looking to lead the way in cloud adoption

Accenture is going to become the first few companies to have most of its internal operations in the cloud.

Over the next 12 to 18 months, this company plans to move more than 90 percent of its IT infrastructure and applications to the cloud. Out of all the divisions, Accenture Australia is leading the way in this adoption of cloud.

This strategy is significant in many ways. Firstly, Accenture is one of the leading companies in terms of cloud usage. Already, it’s the biggest user of Office 365 in the world with an employee strength of more than 260,000. It also uses cloud extensively for documentation management. In fact, for internal document maintenance, it uses software-as-a-solution (SaaS) products like Salesforce to increase its productivity and efficiency. Given this usage, it’s only natural for the company to envision a future where all its applications are in the cloud.

The second aspect that makes this strategy interesting is that Accenture will be in a better position to advise its clients on the right cloud path. When this company has most of its applications in the cloud, it gets more credibility for it to talk about cloud adoption to its clients. In this sense, this strategy can even boost its business in a big way.

That said, this transition process is not going to be easy for Accenture. Already, there have been concerns about moving mission-critical data to the cloud and this is one area that the company will take a deep look into before making its move. It may even choose to keep the remaining 10 percent of data and application in an on-premise storage, if its management feel so strongly about the security.

Another major challenge that Accenture will face is the presence of a large number of legacy systems. Some of its divisions have either near-new applications or very old legacy applications, both of which may be difficult to move. In the case of near-new applications, the investments that were made by the company in its infrastructure can go down the drain if it moves to the cloud without realizing the returns.

One possible way to overcome this problem is to wait till the end of the life of that software and replace it with a cloud-first or cloud-only investment. But, that could take time, depending on the expected life of the application.

In the case of legacy systems though, migrating them to the cloud can be a real hassle. It’ll be interesting to see how Accenture is going to handle both these classes of its assets and system while migrating to the cloud. If it comes with a good strategy, it can set a good precedent for others to move to the cloud as well.

Overall though, it’s a great strategy as it is sure to offer a ton of benefits for Accenture in the long run. It can not only increase its productivity and efficiency, but can also save a ton of money in the process. Not to mention, the example that it would set for other companies to follow suit.

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