A new study from Informatica and Deloitte has found that cloud is “well on the way” to being the dominant vehicle for business analytics.

The report, which was conducted at the end of last year alongside Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and consulted more than 400 global business and technology leaders, found that cloud was either a key or important part of the analytics strategy for 91% of respondents.

In addition, self-service was considered a key component with cloud-ready organisations more likely to go down that route for data management and governance; 94% of those polled said governed self-service was important for their organisations’ analytics implementations.

The benefits of using cloud-based analytics are stark, according to the report; 84% of respondents said business user agility went up through governed self-service for data integration, while similar numbers agreed for data mapping (83%), data modelling (82%) and data governance (77%).

Cost reduction was naturally the primary financial aspect driving cloud analytics, but the study also showed it was the key technical driver. Interestingly, while security and compliance remained the key barrier to adoption – cited by 40% of those polled – security fears lessened according to companies who were further down the road of cloud implementation.

“The key takeaways from our research is that cloud adoption is expanding quickly as companies find success with their first cloud analytics implementations and move to create more mature environments and drive broader adoption,” said Lyndsay Wise, EMA research director in a statement.

“As these environments become more mature and robust, analytics users are demanding access to their data in ways that make it fast and easy to interact with,” Wise added. “In this regard, governed self-service access is the great enabler of the upswell of analytic insight that companies need to stay competitive.”

You can find out more about the report here (registration required).

The pace of change today dictates that almost every organisation of a business move fast and compete, or face disruption. With technology playing such a central role regardless of the type of business, there’s considerable focus on adopting software as an organisational lubricant and various cloud-based models to facilitate operational simplicity and ease of consumption.

Over the past decade considerable organizational energies have been spent on data center optimization, automation as well as laying the foundation for public, private and hybrid clouds. DevOps and BizOps practices have also taken root. What’s notable is a majority of the industry focus and investment has been on securing and optimizing production workloads. IT labs and pre-production environments have taken a backseat.

Labs and pre-production environments are like the kitchen in a 5-star restaurant. Dining areas are fancy, modern and welcoming. But making a visit to the cooking area can be a different experience altogether with blood, sweat and gore all orchestrated in chaos to make meals. With some focus, this can certainly change.  Productivity of the chefs, cleanliness of the environment, smoothness of the workflow, ability to quickly replicate orders, – can all contribute to increase the revenue and reputation of the restaurant aside from helping them optimise costs and have a superior customer experience.

Today a majority of the IT labs are akin to the kitchen in the 5-star hotel. They are very functional, but not necessarily modernised to deal with the requirements of high-performance IT. Getting access to development and test environments can be both complicated and time-consuming. If the environment is complex, the request can be quite time-consuming. Infrastructure readiness, when required, can take weeks, if not months sometimes. All these contribute to slowing down productivity, decreasing efficiency, increasing costs and effecting innovation velocity which has a direct bearing on time to market.

While several dev/test groups utilise AWS, Azure or Google Cloud platform, this is not a suitable option for every type of deployments, and at times, the prevalence of shadow IT causes governance and compliance issues.

So, what can be done to modernize these labs? While production workloads and some dev/test workloads embrace private and public clouds, can the same principles be applied in case of a lab environment?

Conceptually, a cloud is a set of shared infrastructure and resources that allows for on-demand consumption, self-service and as-a-service based models in a multi-tenant architecture and potentially at scale. Can these principles of cloud be applied to lab environments to make them “cloud-ready”? If the lab cannot be taken to the cloud, can the cloud be brought to the lab?

What would this entail? Can the lab be created on-demand? Would it allow efficient utilisation of resources? Would it allow for self-service? Could it have operational simplicity and good governance mechanisms? Will it increase productivity? Would it accelerate innovation velocity?

If the answer is yes to all or most of the above, then it is possible to deliver the lab as-a-service (LaaS). The lab can be transformed into a cloud.

LaaS solutions bring the core benefi­ts of the cloud—self-service, multi-tenancy, automation, and scalability—to on-prem labs and pre-production data centers, turning labs into self-service private clouds. Users can rapidly model and publish blueprints to configure lab infrastructure and then publish those blueprints to a web-based catalog for one-click, on-demand deployment known as live cloud sandboxes.

Companies with massive lab operations—from R&D to QA—can now harness the power of cloud sandboxes to become faster and more agile in a marketplace that prizes efficiency. The benefits can be exponential.

Not unlike their non-technological namesake, cloud sandboxes serve as a personal “playground” for automating the DevOps process. And when packaged as lab-as-a-service (LaaS), these sandboxes are pivotal in transforming labs into personal, private clouds, giving them a common infrastructure that is available every step of the way.

The results can be dramatic. By moving to self-service and automated equipment-access, labs can increase efficiency by over 100%, here are other benefits, too: Labs can buy less equipment, reduce setup and teardown time for infrastructure and, by eliminating configuration issues, improve test success rates 20–50%.

Benefits to managers and engineers

The move to LaaS gives managers complete visibility and control over all of the resources in the lab. By collecting business-intelligence data about sandbox and infrastructure use over time, lab managers can identify equipment that’s no longer in use or equipment that could be powered down between reservations.

Engineers and developers also benefit from a switch to cloud sandboxes. They can design blueprints that meet their exact requirements and let sandbox software find and reserve the equipment needed for any blueprint on the fly. Plus, the sandbox is protected from outside interference or accidental reconfiguration. They can also eliminate hoarding, which costs even small data centers millions of dollars per year.

Top technology solution provider World Wide Technology used LaaS cloud sandbox software to turn its Advanced Technology Center into a self-service cloud. World Wide Technology used Quali to transform its business operations from highly logistics-driven to highly cloud-driven and saw some impressive results.  

LaaS cloud sandboxes are deployable in the private, public and hybrid clouds. Additional key features include visual-based environment modeling, web-based self-service blueprint catalog, intelligent automation and provisioning, remote lab access and consolidation, multi-tenancy and resource optimisation, power control, and reporting and analytics.

As the speed of innovation grows, IT and Dev/Test labs can either hinder innovation velocity or empower it. By converting labs into “cloud” environments, they can serve as powerful catalysts to organisational velocity.

Picture credit: Quali

The pace of change today dictates that almost every organisation of a business move fast and compete, or face disruption. With technology playing such a central role regardless of the type of business, there’s considerable focus on adopting software as an organisational lubricant and various cloud-based models to facilitate operational simplicity and ease of consumption.

Over the past decade considerable organizational energies have been spent on data center optimization, automation as well as laying the foundation for public, private and hybrid clouds. DevOps and BizOps practices have also taken root. What’s notable is a majority of the industry focus and investment has been on securing and optimizing production workloads. IT labs and pre-production environments have taken a backseat.

Labs and pre-production environments are like the kitchen in a 5-star restaurant. Dining areas are fancy, modern and welcoming. But making a visit to the cooking area can be a different experience altogether with blood, sweat and gore all orchestrated in chaos to make meals. With some focus, this can certainly change.  Productivity of the chefs, cleanliness of the environment, smoothness of the workflow, ability to quickly replicate orders, – can all contribute to increase the revenue and reputation of the restaurant aside from helping them optimise costs and have a superior customer experience.

Today a majority of the IT labs are akin to the kitchen in the 5-star hotel. They are very functional, but not necessarily modernised to deal with the requirements of high-performance IT. Getting access to development and test environments can be both complicated and time-consuming. If the environment is complex, the request can be quite time-consuming. Infrastructure readiness, when required, can take weeks, if not months sometimes. All these contribute to slowing down productivity, decreasing efficiency, increasing costs and effecting innovation velocity which has a direct bearing on time to market.

While several dev/test groups utilise AWS, Azure or Google Cloud platform, this is not a suitable option for every type of deployments, and at times, the prevalence of shadow IT causes governance and compliance issues.

So, what can be done to modernize these labs? While production workloads and some dev/test workloads embrace private and public clouds, can the same principles be applied in case of a lab environment?

Conceptually, a cloud is a set of shared infrastructure and resources that allows for on-demand consumption, self-service and as-a-service based models in a multi-tenant architecture and potentially at scale. Can these principles of cloud be applied to lab environments to make them “cloud-ready”? If the lab cannot be taken to the cloud, can the cloud be brought to the lab?

What would this entail? Can the lab be created on-demand? Would it allow efficient utilisation of resources? Would it allow for self-service? Could it have operational simplicity and good governance mechanisms? Will it increase productivity? Would it accelerate innovation velocity?

If the answer is yes to all or most of the above, then it is possible to deliver the lab as-a-service (LaaS). The lab can be transformed into a cloud.

LaaS solutions bring the core benefi­ts of the cloud—self-service, multi-tenancy, automation, and scalability—to on-prem labs and pre-production data centers, turning labs into self-service private clouds. Users can rapidly model and publish blueprints to configure lab infrastructure and then publish those blueprints to a web-based catalog for one-click, on-demand deployment known as live cloud sandboxes.

Companies with massive lab operations—from R&D to QA—can now harness the power of cloud sandboxes to become faster and more agile in a marketplace that prizes efficiency. The benefits can be exponential.

Not unlike their non-technological namesake, cloud sandboxes serve as a personal “playground” for automating the DevOps process. And when packaged as lab-as-a-service (LaaS), these sandboxes are pivotal in transforming labs into personal, private clouds, giving them a common infrastructure that is available every step of the way.

The results can be dramatic. By moving to self-service and automated equipment-access, labs can increase efficiency by over 100%, here are other benefits, too: Labs can buy less equipment, reduce setup and teardown time for infrastructure and, by eliminating configuration issues, improve test success rates 20–50%.

Benefits to managers and engineers

The move to LaaS gives managers complete visibility and control over all of the resources in the lab. By collecting business-intelligence data about sandbox and infrastructure use over time, lab managers can identify equipment that’s no longer in use or equipment that could be powered down between reservations.

Engineers and developers also benefit from a switch to cloud sandboxes. They can design blueprints that meet their exact requirements and let sandbox software find and reserve the equipment needed for any blueprint on the fly. Plus, the sandbox is protected from outside interference or accidental reconfiguration. They can also eliminate hoarding, which costs even small data centers millions of dollars per year.

Top technology solution provider World Wide Technology used LaaS cloud sandbox software to turn its Advanced Technology Center into a self-service cloud. World Wide Technology used Quali to transform its business operations from highly logistics-driven to highly cloud-driven and saw some impressive results.  

LaaS cloud sandboxes are deployable in the private, public and hybrid clouds. Additional key features include visual-based environment modeling, web-based self-service blueprint catalog, intelligent automation and provisioning, remote lab access and consolidation, multi-tenancy and resource optimisation, power control, and reporting and analytics.

As the speed of innovation grows, IT and Dev/Test labs can either hinder innovation velocity or empower it. By converting labs into “cloud” environments, they can serve as powerful catalysts to organisational velocity.

There are 66 million network cameras capturing terabytes of data. How did factories in Japan improve physical security at the facilities and improve employee productivity? Edge Computing reduces possible kilobytes of data collected per second to only a few kilobytes of data transmitted to the public cloud every day. Data is aggregated and analyzed close to sensors so only intelligent results need to be transmitted to the cloud. Non-essential data is recycled to optimize storage.

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There are mixed feelings on the importance of the endpoint’s role in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployment.  We are currently living in a time where companies are finally starting to make great use and adoption of VDI and more generally of cloud services (on premise and localised resources are still largely adopted).  If VDI and cloud services define the way resources and applications are delivered, there is still a big question mark on the future of the endpoint device. What are the drivers and the essential features to have?  Is the endpoint just a means of accessing the VDI service, or should we expect more from them?

Looking at the current landscape of business endpoints, companies are going through a mixed adoption of devices.  Budget limitation, legacy applications, blurred future and unclear requirement decisions lever more on instant necessity than a long term smart strategy.  With no clear strategic drivers, the current landscape is therefore scattered with all sorts of devices. PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, thin and zero clients are creating confusion among users, inefficiency among administrators and are not helping the overall company’s productivity and profitability.

In an era where employees work mostly through technology, it is easy to understand how the endpoint devices can become a vital element to influence or affect business strategy and ultimately business goals (improved productivity, profitability and enhanced security).  In this scenario, two categories of employees are critical to consider:  users and IT administrators.

From one side, companies need to answer to users’ needs of simplicity, user friendliness and improved user experience, while on the other side the administrators’ necessity of security and operational cost reductions have to be considered.  From an endpoint perspective, the key is to provide users with a reliable and user friendly device whereas powerful management and granular monitoring tools are the critical answers for the administrators.

In the modern times, the advent of smartphones and touch-based devices has also changed the expectations of users and the way they use their devices.  Although this affects mainly the consumer market, users are inevitably bringing these expectations to work, forcing IT administrators and manufacturers to come up with solutions that address these needs in the B2B environment.

To further complicate matters, this surge in domestic computing now adds further complexity to the decision-making process, often with the wrong outcome.  Making use of the familiarity of the desktop between home and work devices was once used as a positive; however in business the endpoint device is a tool for the task in hand, so although it has a similar look to a home computer, its purpose is to deliver line of business applications, not home style entertainment.

The endpoint market is no longer driven only by affordable and solid devices and manufacturers need to invest more into research and innovation to lead the market and respond to ever changing requirements.  VDI goes a long way towards re-focusing the purpose of the endpoint, but the initial connection to this centralised service cannot be ignored or dismissed.  This is where endpoint management has to assert itself and assist both users and administrators alike.

Today, companies potentially have a broad spectrum of endpoint devices and to achieve endpoint management requires the use of multiple tools: either Active Directory (or similar) services, frame work management tools or third party utilities. Unfortunately, rather than aiding and improving the workspace, this often complicates and frustrates administrators and users alike.

Thin and zero client is often touted as the perfect solution to VDI access, and although rare, greenfield VDI projects do exist.  Typically, thin clients form part of a bigger estate where a mixture of devices are used for a variety of purposes.  A mixed environment will therefore have old PCs running legacy local applications, laptops for Wi-Fi and roaming connectivity, smartphones and tablets for communication and specific roles with thin clients being used for administration purposes.

Successful thin client implementations have depended on strong management tools and top manufacturers are heavily investing in innovating and extend the capabilities of their software solution to address more of the business estate.  We now are entering the era of “workspace management” where hardware manufacturers are slowly turning into endpoint agnostic, software-based companies to ease the connection to the VDI infrastructure or the cloud based applications required by business.  The goal is therefore to expand on the potential of manageability, simplifying the administrator’s life with single point management solutions and an improved user experience offering a seamless interface across all devices.

The rise of repurposing software and Windows shell replacement solutions is now extending the benefits of thin client management to any device, whilst offering support for legacy applications that cannot be migrated to VDI or the cloud. It is now possible to turn devices, such as PCs and laptops, into powerful, lightweight OS “thin clients” and ultimately provide users with the same experience across all endpoints and administrators with a tool to manage and monitor this diversified workspace.

With these integration methods, the strategy on how to access VDI or cloud-based services can now be addressed. With careful evaluation of the choices currently available on the market, cohesive company standards can now be defined for accessing this new virtual environment. This experience should be pervasive, and not restricted by technology or boundaries, providing a positive impact on a company’s bottom line, driving efficiency in operational costs and improving employee productivity.

The emergence of endpoint agnostic management technologies can put an end to an often-overlooked aspect to deployment, creating opportunities and partially addressing business problems. Once adopted, workspace management will become the ignition point of a flexible way to expand the maximum potential of the endpoint device beyond just being the last piece of the puzzle. 

There are mixed feelings on the importance of the endpoint’s role in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployment.  We are currently living in a time where companies are finally starting to make great use and adoption of VDI and more generally of cloud services (on premise and localised resources are still largely adopted).  If VDI and cloud services define the way resources and applications are delivered, there is still a big question mark on the future of the endpoint device. What are the drivers and the essential features to have?  Is the endpoint just a means of accessing the VDI service, or should we expect more from them?

Looking at the current landscape of business endpoints, companies are going through a mixed adoption of devices.  Budget limitation, legacy applications, blurred future and unclear requirement decisions lever more on instant necessity than a long term smart strategy.  With no clear strategic drivers, the current landscape is therefore scattered with all sorts of devices. PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, thin and zero clients are creating confusion among users, inefficiency among administrators and are not helping the overall company’s productivity and profitability.

In an era where employees work mostly through technology, it is easy to understand how the endpoint devices can become a vital element to influence or affect business strategy and ultimately business goals (improved productivity, profitability and enhanced security).  In this scenario, two categories of employees are critical to consider:  users and IT administrators.

From one side, companies need to answer to users’ needs of simplicity, user friendliness and improved user experience, while on the other side the administrators’ necessity of security and operational cost reductions have to be considered.  From an endpoint perspective, the key is to provide users with a reliable and user friendly device whereas powerful management and granular monitoring tools are the critical answers for the administrators.

In the modern times, the advent of smartphones and touch-based devices has also changed the expectations of users and the way they use their devices.  Although this affects mainly the consumer market, users are inevitably bringing these expectations to work, forcing IT administrators and manufacturers to come up with solutions that address these needs in the B2B environment.

To further complicate matters, this surge in domestic computing now adds further complexity to the decision-making process, often with the wrong outcome.  Making use of the familiarity of the desktop between home and work devices was once used as a positive; however in business the endpoint device is a tool for the task in hand, so although it has a similar look to a home computer, its purpose is to deliver line of business applications, not home style entertainment.

The endpoint market is no longer driven only by affordable and solid devices and manufacturers need to invest more into research and innovation to lead the market and respond to ever changing requirements.  VDI goes a long way towards re-focusing the purpose of the endpoint, but the initial connection to this centralised service cannot be ignored or dismissed.  This is where endpoint management has to assert itself and assist both users and administrators alike.

Today, companies potentially have a broad spectrum of endpoint devices and to achieve endpoint management requires the use of multiple tools: either Active Directory (or similar) services, frame work management tools or third party utilities. Unfortunately, rather than aiding and improving the workspace, this often complicates and frustrates administrators and users alike.

Thin and zero client is often touted as the perfect solution to VDI access, and although rare, greenfield VDI projects do exist.  Typically, thin clients form part of a bigger estate where a mixture of devices are used for a variety of purposes.  A mixed environment will therefore have old PCs running legacy local applications, laptops for Wi-Fi and roaming connectivity, smartphones and tablets for communication and specific roles with thin clients being used for administration purposes.

Successful thin client implementations have depended on strong management tools and top manufacturers are heavily investing in innovating and extend the capabilities of their software solution to address more of the business estate.  We now are entering the era of “workspace management” where hardware manufacturers are slowly turning into endpoint agnostic, software-based companies to ease the connection to the VDI infrastructure or the cloud based applications required by business.  The goal is therefore to expand on the potential of manageability, simplifying the administrator’s life with single point management solutions and an improved user experience offering a seamless interface across all devices.

The rise of repurposing software and Windows shell replacement solutions is now extending the benefits of thin client management to any device, whilst offering support for legacy applications that cannot be migrated to VDI or the cloud. It is now possible to turn devices, such as PCs and laptops, into powerful, lightweight OS “thin clients” and ultimately provide users with the same experience across all endpoints and administrators with a tool to manage and monitor this diversified workspace.

With these integration methods, the strategy on how to access VDI or cloud-based services can now be addressed. With careful evaluation of the choices currently available on the market, cohesive company standards can now be defined for accessing this new virtual environment. This experience should be pervasive, and not restricted by technology or boundaries, providing a positive impact on a company’s bottom line, driving efficiency in operational costs and improving employee productivity.

The emergence of endpoint agnostic management technologies can put an end to an often-overlooked aspect to deployment, creating opportunities and partially addressing business problems. Once adopted, workspace management will become the ignition point of a flexible way to expand the maximum potential of the endpoint device beyond just being the last piece of the puzzle. 

IBM has released a new API for its Quantum Experience program, which will enable developers to build interfaces between its cloud-based quantum computers and its classical equivalents.

According to Gartner’s most recent hype cycle, from August last year, quantum computing – the process of using quantum-mechanical phenomena, such as entanglement, to perform operations – will take more than 10 years to hit the mainstream.

IBM defines it thus. “While technologies that currently run on classical computers, such as Watson, can help find patterns and insights buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen because the data doesn’t exist and the possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous to ever be processed by classical computers,” the company notes.

Use cases of quantum computing could include improving cloud security through the application of quantum physics, greater modelling of financial data, and making machine learning and artificial intelligence more powerful, IBM added.

According to the Armonk giant, quantum computing is the next cab off the rank to be enhanced through cloud-based platforms after machine learning and blockchain, two technologies much further ahead in Gartner’s cycle.

“IBM has invested over decades to growing the field of quantum computing and we are committed to expanding access to quantum systems and their powerful capabilities for the science and business communities,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of hybrid cloud and director for IBM Research in a statement.

“Following Watson and blockchain, we believe that quantum computing will provide the next powerful set of services delivered via the IBM Cloud platform, and promises to be the next major technology that has the potential to drive a new era of innovation across industries,” Krishna added.

IBM’s record of innovation continues to blaze ahead, with more than 8,000 US patents granted last year, well ahead of nearest competitor Samsung, according to figures released in January. Of that number, around a third were related to artificial intelligence, cognitive computing and cloud computing.

You can find out more here.

Picture credit: “Quantum Computer Interior”, by “IBM Research”, used under CC BY ND