Cloud infrastructure services are rapidly becoming the de facto choice for enterprise IT workloads. According to Gartner, the 2019 worldwide revenue from public cloud IT services is expected to grow by 17.5% and will become a $330 billion dollar industry by 2022. Cloud-based technology is no longer an emerging trend, it’s mainstream, with 69% of enterprises moving business-critical workloads to the cloud.

What is the appeal of the cloud?

Cloud technology enables an agile working environment that can drive successful business transformation initiatives. In most cloud solutions, all a user requires is an active internet connection and login credentials to consume enterprise workloads. An Agile workplace helps to facilitate team collaboration, hot-desking, and home working initiatives that can boost productivity and enhance working relationships.

In cloud computing, everything is bigger, and the sheer scale of major cloud provider’s technical solutions is staggering, harnessing this scalability is another major appeal of the cloud. Cloud products are horizontally and vertically scalable, meaning users can scale out their applications using multiples of efficient compute nodes, and scale up (and down) dynamically adding or removing compute resources to individual systems.

As businesses grow, there may be a surge in capacity requirements, including a faster network and the extra demand for storage. Onsite enterprise data centers are expensive to maintain, and purchasing new hardware is heavy on the wallet. With the cloud, petabytes of storage are available at the click of a button, and you only pay for what you consume. Cybersecurity is always a top agenda item in any company boardroom, and cloud computing enables users to consume security as a service.

Cloud security is primarily about protecting against the user's data being compromised (destroyed or stolen), and users experiencing a service outage (denial of service). Cloud platforms designed from the ground up to be secure, and as threats are increasing in scale and severity, many enterprise organizations are choosing the cloud to mitigate the security risk.

Cloud infrastructure has backup and redundancy capabilities at its core. All cloud providers offer some type of backup-as-a-service, and the system architecture is created to be redundant, so that all data is protected, all of the time. Offsite copies of data are stored regionally specific, and most cloud providers offer disaster recovery services as standard, giving the user the capability to seamlessly fail over services to another region/country if major system issues are experienced.

One other major appeal of the cloud is the expectation of cost savings, although the costs will take time to reduce, over time, the capital expenditure will decrease significantly as businesses switch away from a local data center model, buying and leasing servers, and all the associated costs and complexities of licensing.

Making preparations

The jump to the cloud requires significant planning and preparation to reap the wealth of benefits available. Even if a business chooses to outsource this responsibility, we recommend all organizations have a grip on what cloud services they want and how they want to consume them.

Multitudes of technical activities are required for successful cloud migration. Creating Service Level Objectives (SLO) is an essential task to help define how the service should perform. Setting Service Level

Indicators (SLI) will allow you to measure the attributes of the service, such as system availability or the overall performance of the service. Together, these will help determine if a cloud solution is fit for purpose. Google Cloud suggest the next steps are the creation of a presentation layer (network) that handles the flow of information through the cloud service, a Business logic layer (compute) that manipulates the data to make it useful for the user, and the data layer (Storage) to store or retrieve the digital information.

Each cloud design must be resilient, horizontally and vertically scalable, and disaster recovery capable. A distributed design adds resiliency for geographic scaling and failover. Many businesses experience a “peak season” where system usage ramps up for a period of time, scalability of compute resources and being able to increase the number of compute nodes adds an elastic computing capability.

Cloud services are secure, future-proofed and cost-optimized. In a traditional data center, physical or virtual computing assets are purchased in advance, often sitting idle, wasting money, resources, and power. On-Demand compute fixes this capacity planning problem.

Additional services such as automated deployment (DevOps), monitoring, alerting and incident response are an inherent design of the cloud. Stateless design drives SLI, SLO and SLA objectives and your enterprise will be able to grow exponentially, both financially and geographically, with the benefits of uptime, scalability and future expansion being readily available.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

The rollout of 5G has begun in earnest. Verizon and other US carriers have already unveiled the tech and its groundbreaking speeds in a few key markets, and across the pond in the UK, some major carriers are widely expected to deploy 5G later this summer. Many expect 5G to be equally as disruptive – if not more so – than cloud computing has been over the past few years.

All of this raises questions when it comes to the cloud. How will 5G’s breakneck mobile speeds affect cloud computing and many of the most common applications of it? What are examples of the cloud – and technology more generally – that 5G will markedly improve versus those it may render obsolete?

Why 5G is such a big deal

Before we dive too deeply into how 5G will affect the cloud, it will be useful to have at least a layman’s understanding of what 5G actually is and how it works. Like the network standards before it, 5G employs radio frequency (RF) waves to transmit and receive data. The minimum speeds a network must provide to both downloading and uploading for it to be classified as 5G are 20 Gbps per second down and 10 Gbps up. For comparison’s sake, the minimum download and upload speeds for the first iteration of 4G were 150 and 15 megabits, respectively.

As big of an increase as these speeds represent, 5G also presents an equally groundbreaking decrease in latency. Latency is the time it takes for two devices on a network to respond to one another. 3G networks had latency of about 100 milliseconds; 4G is around 30 milliseconds; while 5G will be as low as 1 millisecond, which is for all intents and purposes instantaneous.

What 5G will improve

Thanks to the insanely low latency we mentioned above, things that rely on speed will be obviously improved. Near real-time control of robotics will open up new worlds – and indeed, already has – when it comes to remote surgery, which will literally save lives.

With 5G will come incalculable improvements to the Internet of Things (IoT), which is much more than just being able to tweet from your refrigerator. Smart cities rely on IoT to reduce traffic congestion, stay on top of water distribution needs, increase security, and even decrease pollution. Agriculture uses IoT devices to be more efficient and thus increase the globe’s food supply. 5G will also vastly improve truly autonomous, self-driving cars to the point where wide adoption may very well become a reality. All of these will help keep us safer, healthier, and alive longer.

If it seems like 5G will only being improvements, that might not be the case – especially for the cloud.

Possible impact to the cloud

Trying to come up with a definitive list of every possible aspect of cloud computing that 5G will affect is likely an impossible task, as we won’t fully know until it’s widely rolled out and customers and enterprises have had a chance to acclimatise to it. But even in these days of 5G infancy, there are definite known knowns.

First, as we have covered, 5G will effectively eliminate latency, allowing device to connect nearly instantly. What does that mean for the cloud? In theory – it could mean the death knell for cloud computing as a whole.

Think about it. One of the main reasons the cloud is so beneficial is for numerous devices – either in an organisation for a private cloud or any user with an Internet connection for a public cloud – to connect to and transmit data with a central machine or hard drive located on the cloud. For an employee to share a large video file with a colleague who’s working from home that day, the cloud made it simple – just put it on the shared drive, wait for it to upload, notify your co-worker it’s up there, and he or she can download it from the same shared drive.

But why go through all that if your device can connect with your colleague’s device with only a millisecond of latency and a minimum connection speed of 20 Gbps down and 10 Gbps up? That large 10 gigabyte video can be transferred from user to user directly in about eight seconds and there’s no need to go through an additional step or use an online repository.

While the cloud will still likely have significant use cases in a post-5G world – especially if cloud providers are ready to adapt – it’s not too much of a stretch to envisage a world where the cloud is largely a thing of the past.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

When the moment comes that you decide it’s time to move your business to the cloud: rejoice! As my favorite Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi once said, “You’ve just taken your first step into a larger world.”

Your deciding factor to make the move might have been any number of things:

• Cost
• Need for growth
• Flexibility
• Keeping up the competition
• Security
• Productivity

But adapting your business for success in the cloud isn’t the easiest nut to crack. Some might think of it the way they would about moving from an old house to a new one: cram everything into a box, make the move, unload in your new digs, and enjoy.

While that last part will likely come true once you’ve made a successful transition to hosting your business in the cloud computing environment, the pre-move decisions are the ones that can really make it a pleasant transition or an unmitigated disaster. Here are five strategies to employ to get your business ready for the big day when you go digital for good.

Do your homework

My father researches automobiles for a minimum of one year before buying a new one. He’ll read every safety report and review out there, start compiling a shortlist, compare prices throughout the year at various dealerships and ones in other cities and pick the brain of 50 different people before he even sets foot on a showroom floor. By the time he’s in the sales office, he’s the one telling them exactly how much money he’s willing to pay and what features he wants for that price.

You need that same level of commitment when you’re seeking out a new home for your business infrastructure, data and website. The really sobering thought here is that picking the wrong vendor here isn’t like making a bad choice on who to have supply your bottled water. If you mess up, it’ll take a whole lot of extra work to undo your mistakes and move on to the next provider.

Have a strategy

Yes, your plan is to move your business into a cloud computing environment, but this is no less complex a procedure than physically moving your office from one brick-and-mortar location to another. What is the most important thing you want to get out of moving to the cloud? You have to define that singularity to know how to go forward.

If you’re getting ready for an expansion, get your staff up and running on your new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) seems like the priority so the transition is seamless when your company grows. If you’ve run out of room to store data, get the next servers set up in the cloud first so you can automatically load new data there, then begin the migration process for everything else. Realize that this is not just a lateral move, but a chance to rapidly improve on your existing business model. That doesn’t just mean finally deleting your family vacation photos off the server, but giving you a real chance to enhance your company’s workflow by organizing everything to maximize productivity.

Changing IT providers

Breaking up is hard to do, and that is doubly true when the relationship you’re going to be ending is with your IT provider – assuming it’s not an in-house position. Unless you’re a tech junkie yourself, there’s something a little unnerving about telling the only men and women who know your company’s servers and networks inside and out that their services are no longer required. This is a particularly prickly subject if you have questions or need guidance about how to access certain parts of your network or are struggling to make the transition.

More likely than not, your new IT team in the cloud is going to only be available remotely to assist you, and while they are usually terrific professionals, you will be without your trusty IT sidekick for a while. A smart way around this dilemma is to be open and honest with your IT provider about what is transpiring. You’re paying them anyway, so consider making that final invoice include the IT provider giving you a complete map of everything on your server as well as remaining “on call” during your transition to help with any bottlenecks you may encounter along the way.

Legacy systems to cloud applications

How many of us have had a love/hate relationship with a particular software application? I once worked at a chemical news website that had a system for reporters to file their stories that must have dated back to the Stone Age. One French reporter had misspelled her own name about 20 times in the ‘Author’ listing, but every single instance came up when you tried to attach her byline to the web version of the article. This might be the most bitter pill for a lot of older companies and employees to accept: some of your comfortable long-term programs are not going to be able to make the move with you; particularly those that are systems of record, as the older ones rely greatly on physical documents. The government is to blame (aren’t they always?) for a lot of this. Legacy systems installed by the government never even had a web environment in mind, to say nothing of the cloud. The solution for a lot of companies is a hybrid cloud environment that combines the traditional aspects of a public cloud – IaaS, software as a service (SaaS) and desktop as a service (DaaS) – with aspects of a private cloud built specifically for your company.

Say you have oodles of data that can’t be converted to a new software but can be stored as image files. This could lead to a private cloud setup where the images files are stored until such time as they can be converted to the new cloud application. There are often lots of man-hours involved in a conversion like this, but the end result is the data secured and saved in perpetuity in a format that is easily accessible from anywhere on any device.

Have a little faith

Even those of us who have known the Internet our entire professional lives can get a bit antsy at the idea of pulling the plug on our databases, server rooms and so on in favor of trusting the all-encompassing cloud to be the new backbone of our organization. I think the primal fear exists for many of us that we’ll turn on the computer, log onto our spot in the cloud and be faced with a white screen; all of our information vanished forever.  

Thankfully, cloud computing doesn’t work that way. Apprehension is always a factor to overcome when dealing with new technology in the workplace, but when you’ve crossed that barrier, you’ll absolutely love the result. Being able to do your work faster with unlimited collaboration and the ability to log on to your company server from anywhere in the world is a remarkable benefit for your small leap of faith.