Cloud will be an enabler of innovation and growth: Here’s how to leverage it

By Narsimha M

Previously, enterprises viewed cloud as a way to reduce costs and optimise their workloads. Today, the cloud is no longer about merely simplifying infrastructure but about providing faster applications. Delivering applications faster, with innovative features, is the key to creating exciting user journeys and improving customer stickiness. Empowered thus, organisations are increasingly putting customer experience ahead in their strategy for business growth.

In this digital age, data has become paramount. Data is the lifeblood of today’s digital marketplace – the means by which digital enterprises uncover how lean are their operations, how effective are their processes and how engaged are their customers. The ability to leverage data about every customer action can help enterprises craft delightful customer offerings – and this is where cloud is a key differentiator.

Cloud as an enabler of innovation and growth

Applications on the cloud work dynamically to ensure always-on and always-available business operations. With integrated data analytics powered by big data, enterprises can enhance their decision-making process by gleaning insights into possible downtime incidents and failures, understand how their customers interact with their products and services and build services to improve customer satisfaction.

Image Credit: IBM

Take for example, a global automobile manufacturer that used APIs to leverage big data on cloud and offer real-time contextual services for drivers as well as the extended automobile ecosystem. This way, the company moves beyond being just car manufacturers, but also a creators of a complete experience that covers financial services, concierge services and more, all with the car at the center.

Deploying applications on cloud allows enterprises to play with new functionalities, set up infrastructure much faster than before and go live within days. DevOps plays a vital role in helping such enterprises change on the go and adopt new technologies by leveraging agile practices and people transformation. For instance, an education service provider has leveraged a cloud-based platform that integrates niche enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions and applications to create an integrated community cloud that now connects over 450 schools. This ensures seamless and uniform learning for students of all schools irrespective of location while simplifying the management.

Multi-cloud environments give businesses the flexibility to reduce their dependency on a single cloud provider. In doing so, these environments simplify large-scale operations, manage a variety of workloads and prevent vendor lock-in while improving reliability and accelerating operations – for themselves and their customers.

An enterprise may choose to keep their external facing applications on one cloud vendor while keeping their internal applications hosted on another cloud vendor.

Three ways to leverage the cloud

Lift and shift 
By moving applications in their current state from an on-premise server to that in a cloud environment, enterprises can infuse better functionalities, ensure higher security and deliver a better customer experience at a much lower cost. A case in point here is of a global provider of technology and hardware for document and information management that embarked on a journey to move their services to private clouds, by simply consolidating 9 data centers to two tier-III data centers. By reducing their server count, they not only increased system availability to 99.99 per cent, but were able to slash costs for hosting, hardware, utility, and licensing infrastructure by 30 percent. Besides improving performance, migrating to cloud has helped the client deliver new hosting services for their customers.

Image: Microsoft

Re-engineer applications 
Enterprises need to modernise and upgrade many of their existing applications to be able to work with modern technology. Applications need to be upgraded to function seamlessly in a cloud environment to make them truly scalable and efficient. For example, a software developer for legal firms had designed their products to run on physical servers within law firms. While this was done to safeguard sensitive information, data could be only be accessed from within the customers’ offices. To make things simpler for their customers, the company re-engineered their software to work on the cloud on a multi-tenant model. Now, the software is provided as a service with improved performance and 99.99 per cent system availability. Besides reducing costs incurred by customers, they increased their business by targeting new segments such as small, medium and large firms who can buy their products with zero investment in hardware.

Cloud Native Applications 
While a large number of enterprises are still investing in moving/re-engineering applications for a cloud environment, for many a parallel journey of building applications that are cloud-first is the way forward. This involves understanding cloud computing architecture and taking advantage of cloud computing frameworks, to build and deliver various services directly from the cloud. Recently, a global retailer looking for scalability, agility, productivity, and performance deployed a cloud-based solution that merged a robust e-commerce platform with various systems such as content management, search and recommendations, and cart management. The new platform has helped the retailer rapidly deploy their digital solutions and enter new markets such as Australia, the Middle East and China.

Today, cloud is already an enabler of transformation for organisations looking for simpler operations and leaner workloads. Going forward, it is set to drive greater innovation and growth. The way forward is to leverage cloud along with innovative and emerging technologies such as IoT, blockchain and AI, thereby creating a robust digital foundation that will help smart organisations stay ahead.

The author is SVP and Head – Infosys Validation Solutions & Cloud, Infrastructure and Security, Infosys

Publish date: April 10, 2017 10:52 am| Modified date: April 10, 2017 10:52 am

Microsoft has announced that it will be bringing the entire Visual Studio IDE to macOS this month

visual studio microsoft

By tech2 News Staff /  14 Nov 2016 , 18:07

Microsoft has announced Visual Studio for Mac at the Connect(); conference this month.

For the first time in its history, Microsoft is bringing its Visual Studio development tool to the Mac. As Microsoft explains in its blog, “At its heart, Visual Studio for Mac is a macOS counterpart of the Windows version of Visual Studio.” The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is designed to feel familiar to a macOS user, while still offering the cross-platform and cloud-based development capabilities of its Windows counterpart.

This IDE will reside alongside Visual Studio Code for macOS, which is a stand-alone, cross-platform text editor for developers.

Microsoft’s sudden interest in cross-platform development seems to stem from a deeper desire to connect with developers, regardless of their OS of choice, and offer them a common, connected platform to work on.

Microsoft has shown tremendous interest in cross-platform development this year, notably with their acquisition of Xamarin. Xamarin started out as a cross-platform development tool for developing iOS, Android, Windows and Mac apps. With its acquisition, Microsoft integrated its workflows into Visual Studio itself.

As TechCrunch suggests, Microsoft has realised that the future depends on cloud-based tools and services like Azure and that’s also where the company is making its money. If more developers start using Visual Studio, more developers will inevitably start using Microsoft’s Azure cloud services.

For developers, this is a win-win anyway.

Indian enterprises and Hybrid cloud solutions are a good mix, says top execs

  03 Oct 2016 , 12:08

As enterprises the world over aim for a secured and faster Cloud experience, Hybrid Cloud solutions are turning out to be the preferred choice for them including in India for enhanced efficiency and productivity and improved cyber security, top executives have said.

A Hybrid Cloud is an integrated Cloud service utilising both private and public Clouds to perform distinct functions within the same organisation.

Enterprises the world over are moving to Hybrid Cloud faster than anyone expected to support digital transformation, drive business model innovation and fuel growth and

Microsoft focusing on cloud and newer technologies to drive digital transformation in India

#MICROSOFT

By tech2 News Staff /  22 Sep 2016 , 17:59

Microsoft hosted a two-day event in Bengaluru and some of the prominent names present were Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman, Microsoft India, Anil Bhansali, Managing Director, Microsoft India (R&D) and Sriram Rajamani, Managing Director, Microsoft Research India, among others.

After talking about its cloud adoption in India and how the company plans to go all out with emerging technologies like AI, bots and NLP, the company spoke about its mission for digital transformation in India. Microsoft is primarily known as the ‘Windows’ company, but the two-day event put forth a new face wherein the recognition goes beyond or is rather not limited to Windows.

Talking about this change, Pramanik said, “It is very evident. If you look at the personal computing strategy, it’s not just Windows, all our products like Office and Skype are available on Android and iOS. It doesn’t matter what the OS is. Secondly, we are creating bots on Skype so they will run on all platforms. Think about augmented reality, we can integrate with anything with the capability. But, Windows 10 is important. It gives the same user interface and flexibility across multiple platforms, be it IoT, XBox, Surface, tablets, and PC. While you will be able run apps and services across multiple devices, Windows gives you the unique opportunity to have the same software, apps and user interface. If I walk into my living room, my Xbox opens up, it has Cortana, Skype and Edge and whatever my phone knows about me, the device knows.”

The company is looking to create building blocks based on the current trends like the massive explosion of data, intelligence from machine learning and advanced analytics, along with the economies and agility of cloud computing to drive digital transformation in India. The focus remains on Microsoft cloud services that claim to be trying to fuel innovation by helping organisations engage with customers with a tailored experience, optimise operations through cost savings, cloud automation, IoT and operational insights, better customer relation management, analytics and also improve employee productivity via collaboration and new age ISV solutions on the cloud.

The company already has some initiatives in the education and agricultural sector in partnership with the Indian government (more on this here). For instance, The Andhra Pradesh government is using Microsoft’s Azure machine learning to predict dropouts across 10,000 schools.

To give a big boost to Digital India, PM Modi’s ambitious project, Microsoft also seemed pretty keen on enabling Aadhaar-embedded Skype. Pramanik explained how Aadhaar-embedded Skype could work, wherein it could be used to verify identity. He further spoke about working on technology that could replace ID verification using one time password to doing it using an iris scan. Though there is no current partnership to doing so, Microsoft is open to working on it.

Microsoft has also entered into a strategic relationship with PwC, which is now a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider. It will help expand the reach to organisations of all size in various sectors including Financial services, Government and public sector, manufacturing, consumer goods and so on.

Amway India also teamed up with Microsoft to conceptualise and design a digitally-enabled Experience Store in Bengaluru. The experience is a result of several new-age technologies such as Augmented Reality, Gamification, Virtual Makeover Studio, Interactive Table and Virtual Cart. Similarly, a Pune-based startup, CarIQ, is also using Microsoft cloud to enable deep analytics and scalability to process data and offer products to car owners. So, the device collects data directly from the car, uses Big Data to understand it and recommends a course of action to car owners accordingly. This data is further believed to help car insurance companies. Similarly, NIIT and Fortis Healthcare are using Microsoft cloud services. SBI Life is using a mobile-based tool (Vymo) that runs on Microsoft Azure.

Asia emerges as a hot destination for setting up data centers

#CLOUD COMPUTING

Representational image

  26 Aug 2016 , 12:07

By Muqbil Ahmar

With the proliferation of cheap smartphones and tablets and the ever-expanding reach of the Internet, Asia—particularly South-East Asia–has emerged as a hot destination for the setting up of data centers. Rise in Internet users together with good economic growth translates into greater data demand. With the tremendous expansion of the Internet and a huge potential for growth, Cloud providers place servers close to users for better services and reaction times. This leads directly to the setting up of more data centers.

The region has seen a sudden spike in the establishment of data centers. While Google set up its first data centers in Singapore and Taiwan, Amazon Web Services (AMS) built data centers in Singapore and Tokyo (Japan). According to APAC Reach, a marketing and research company assisting expansion in the Asia-Pacific region, there has been a great increase these days in European clients interested in investing in data centers in the area after the Brexit referendum in the UK. Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan’s largest telecom company, has opened its doors to about £309-million data center facility, outside capital Taipei. Similarly, Deskera, a leading Cloud software provider in South-East Asia, has announced spending S$50 million over the next three years to construct a wholly-owned Cloud data center in Singapore. The company plans to make it one of the biggest software as a service (SaaS) centers in South-East Asia.

“We are investing in this data center to offer customers fast and reliable services. It will strengthen our ecosystem and help in our plans to support business expansion across multiple industries,” said Shashank Dixit, CEO, Deskera.

Cloud shift is the reason for propagation of data centers
As software companies move from premise-based technology to Cloud-based technology, IT companies are migrating from traditional resources, such as direct server and software license purchases, to Cloud computing. Consequently, they need to set up fast-paced and resilient infrastructure. Establishing data centers is one way to achieve that goal and support the company’s plans of expansion.

“Cloud adoption is expanding at an incredible rate and consequently it is critical that there is resilient and robust infrastructure in place,” added Shashank.

Major spike predicted in IT spending
According to global research firm Gartner, the IT sector will globally spend over $1 trillion due to the Cloud shift over the next 5 years, making Cloud computing one of the most disruptive forces since the beginning of the digital age.

“Cloud-first strategies are the foundation for staying relevant in a fast-paced world,” said Ed Anderson, vice president at Gartner. “The market for Cloud services has grown to such an extent that it is now a notable percentage of total IT spending, helping to create a new generation of start-ups and ‘born in the Cloud’ providers.”Apart from Cloud replacing or complementing present IT systems, applications and services are exclusively being created to run in the Cloud.

Among other things, IT spending will be on setting up resilient infrastructure, including establishing data centers, to support expansion.

What is a data center?
A data center is a building used to house servers, storage devices, cables, and Internet connection. Besides, the center has equipment for power supply and cooling. It generally includes backup power supplies, data communication connections, environmental controls (e.g., air conditioning, fire suppression) and various security devices. Large data centers are industrial-scale facilities that use electricity equivalent to a small town.

At the start of the Digital Age, computers were so big that special rooms had to be created to house them. Later, despite the miniaturization in computer sizes, increase in functional scope needed them to still be housed in individual rooms. The need for data centers arose during the dot-com bubble of the early 21st century. Companies needed fast Internet connectivity and uninterrupted operations in order to deploy systems. Many built large facilities, called Internet data centers (IDCs), to provide clients with a range of solutions for systems deployment and operations.

Why the data center boom in Asia?
While Internet penetration in Southeast Asian nations like Singapore and Hong Kong may not swell further, there is huge prospect for growth in countries such as Cambodia (population of 14.8 million), Indonesia (237.5 million), and Vietnam (88.0 million). Putting together China and India (with more than a billion people each), a majority of the world’s population is yet to go online, particularly those living in Asia. With the Digital Revolution reaching far-fetched places, the demand for data infrastructure is set to increase exponentially. This is just the beginning.

With over 10 years of experience in the field of journalism, the author is a technology evangelist and avid blogger. 

Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook bat for a green future

#CLOUD COMPUTING

Representational image

  30 Sep 2016 , 12:54

By Muqbil Ahmar

Digitisation has left no area of human endeavor untouched. This has led to a veritable data tsunami. No wonder, data centers are springing up everywhere to meet the growing needs for data. With technology shifting from premise-based to cloud-based ones, there is a race to set up data centers all over the world, particularly in India and Asia. Internet services major Amazon launched its first set of data centers in India recently, Microsoft as three, IBM has two, and many others doing the same. As increasingly greater numbers of software companies shift to the cloud, the number of data centers is only set to explode.

Data centers are huge consumers of power
Modern data centers are big industrial facilities that consume huge amounts of power. A typical data center consumes as much electricity as a small town. According to a study by the US Department of Energy, data centers in the country consume around 2% of the total power produced. The facilities used around 70 billion kilowatt hours in 2014, according to the study conducted in collaboration with Stanford, Northwestern, and Carnegie Mellon universities, roughly translating into energy consumed by 6.4 million average American homes.

Consequently, IT giants are looking at several strategies to offset the environmental costs of running a data center, with the main thrust being on using alternative or renewable energy resources to power the massive facilities. As part of their commitment to a clean environment, technology biggies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon are moving their data centers towards all-green operations.

Microsoft leverages green power for its data centers
Microsoft recently announced that its data centers globally would be powered by 50 percent renewable energy by 2018. The IT giant also plans to increase the use of renewable power for data centers to 60 percent by 2020s.

“As we begin to tap the power of the cloud to address these challenges, we must also ensure that we are building a responsible cloud. Tremendous amounts of energy will be required to power this data-driven revolution. The leading cloud companies have a responsibility to address this energy usage. And Microsoft believes that, as large energy consumers, we have the opportunity to drive change that will benefit not only our company but the world,” said Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s chief environmental strategist, on Microsoft’s Green Blog.

“That is why Microsoft announced a new, principled approach to helping advance a clean energy future. We committed to greater transparency, including reporting our energy consumption across regions and the mix of sources for the power we use, while continuing to report our total energy consumption and impact of our carbon program,” added Bernard.

Microsoft is already powered by 40-45% renewable energy sources, claims Microsoft. The IT giant has committed to using 50 percent renewable energy by 2018, 60% by early next decade and to keep enhancing its capacity from there.

Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook also join the bandwagon
Recently, Apple too announced the completion of a 50MW solar farm in Arizona, USA, to offset power consumption by the company’s new data center in the same region. The company also aims for 100% renewable energy use in the future and has claimed that in 2015, 93% of its energy came from renewable sources of energy. In fact, Apple has been investing in renewable energy resources for many years.

Amazon also has plans to build a 253MW wind farm in the USA to to power its massive cloud operations. The wind farm would be the company’s fifth and largest renewable energy project till date. The cloud giant has also announced other wind and solar projects. According to the company, the entire yearly production of the renewable energy projects will surpass 2.6 million MWh. It has also claimed that 40 percent of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) energy needs would be met by renewable sources by the end of 2016.

Google has aimed for 100% renewable energy sources, claiming to be the largest non-utility purchaser of renewable energy in the world. Facebook too plans to use renewables sources to meet 50 percent of its data center power needs by 2018. Smaller companies like Salesforce too have made substantial commitments to explore renewable energy options.

Renewable energy facilities offset environmental costs of data centers
According to NASA figures, global temperatures have risen by more than 1 degree since 1880, while 9 of the 10 warmest years ever recorded have occurred since 2000. In 2012, Arctic ice shrank to its lowest ever level. Global sea levels are rising at 3.4 mm per year. Against such a backdrop, cloud giants want to ensure that their operations don’t have an adverse effect on the environment.

As the hunger for data increases in modern society, giant cloud providers will scramble to keep their operations environmentally sustainable and ecologically viable, so that the environmental costs don’t overrun the cost of digitalisation.

With over 10 years of experience in the field of journalism, the author is a technology evangelist and avid blogger.